New secondary hard drive runs very slow for decrypting & shrinking - HELP!

[Slates71]

I recently bought a Maxtor Diamond 9 160GB hard drive (8MB buffer) primarily for use with my decrypting and shrinking of movies. The problem is it's reading and writing real slow. On my main C Drive i'm running at 31,188kps but on my new drive it's only 1,773kps. This takes me approx 1 1/4 hours to decrypt and over 3 hours to shrink ! But on my older Maxtor drive its runs far quicker....... I know the drive is connected correctly as a slave drive but its crazily slow.... 55 minx to burn a film on Nero where as its half that time on my main drive. I know this is more of a technical question butI don't know where else to go... Your help would really appreciated... thank you

[dimzon]

Check you have UltraDMA mode enabled and active for your drive

[Slates71]

I clicked onto control panel/system/device manager. I then clicked onto IDE ATA/ATAPI contollers. I clicked on Primary IDE Channel and then onto advanced settings. Here device 0 stated Transfer Mode: 'DMA if available' and Current Transfer Mode: 'Ultra DMA Mode5' (greyed out). On device 1 Transfer Mode: 'DMA if available' and Current Transfer Mode: 'PIO mode' (greyed out).

I then clicked on the secondary IDE channeland got the following.

Device 0 stated Transfer mode: 'DMA mode if available' and Current Transfer Mode 'Ultra DMA Mode2' (greyed out). Device1 was Transfer Mode: 'DMA if available' and Current Transfer Mode: 'Ultra DMA Mode2' (greyed out).

Are both IDE channels set correct?. Both are set slightly different and I don't know if that is correct or not. When I got the drive I fitted it as specified on the manual as a slave then just formatted it using windows..... I'm confused even more now !

[communist]

Make sure both drives on one cable support the fastest mode. The controller will run at that highest speed which both drives support.
If that is not the problem you're most certainly suffering from the DMA / PIO glitch.
http://users.bigpond.net.au/ninjaduck/itserviceduck/udma_fix/

[tigerman8u]

"On device 1 Transfer Mode: 'DMA if available' and Current Transfer Mode: 'PIO mode' (greyed out)."

Go to "device manager" and uninstall your ide controller/s in question. Reboot your computer and it should be set back to DMA mode.

Also check in your bios settings and make sure dma is enabled

[Slates71]

Thanks for info Tigerman, however, Once I uninstalled the driver and rebooted it detected the new drives and the PIO mode was changed to DMA. It then asked to restart, after I did this it reverted back to the PIO on device 1. Maybe it is something in my BIOS. I did have a quick look but didn't find anything and am not that familiar with BIOS settings. Where do I go in the BIOS exactly and what do I do. Thanks for your patience. I did a test using Maxtors Powermax test facility and it came up all OK so it must be a setting somewhere in my system, just can't find it !!!

[Slates71]

Tigerman

I've just been into the BIOS and went into the main section and pressed enter over my new drive.A list appeared with PIO Mode=[4] - this was greyed out and Ultra DMA=[5] - This was also greyed out. I clicked on the 'Auto' at the top and was given option including 'enter user HDD' or something like that. When I clicked it the PIO Mode and Ultra DMA became available to alter the numbers. I became a little nervous so I exited without saving changes. Is this the place? Help !!!!!
One other thing, might not be important, I noticed that on my main boot drive there was a part called 'Maximum capacity LBA' this was 40637MB on the boot drive and only 8455MB on my new much larger drive. probably nothing but I thought i'd better let u know.
Thank you

[tigerman8u]

If you click the auto detect in your bios it should automatically detect the size etc.of your hard drive if your bios supports 120gb> or larger. Enable the dma in your bios. You can always reset to factory default if need be. What o/s are you running ie win xp? Do you know the make of your mother board. Can you give me more info on your system specs?

[Slates71]

System specs are as follows:
AMD Athon XP1600+
A7A266 Asus 266MZ Motherboard
Windows XP with Service Pack 1 and 2
Maxtor 4K040H2 40GB ATA-100 EIDE hard drive (Master)
Maxtor 6Y160PO 160GB Diamond 9 8MB (Slave) - New problem drive
Pioneer DVR-109 DVD/RW drive
Teac CDRW
Nvidia FX5200 graphics card
Creative 5.1 sound card

I'll assume that the Current transfer mode on the primary IDE channel ruuning on device 1 in PIO mode (greyed out) is causing the problem. Shall I try another cable out? I can't imagine I've installed it wrong as the black end is connected to my master, blue motherboard, and the grey the new hard drive. My nero checked the speed of the new drive just and its running at 650kbs.. my main drive 21,000kbs !!!!

[CWR03]

Definitely check the cable - I almost threw out a perfectly good hard drive because the cable had become slightly pinched.