Hi,

I have just fitted a new 200GB drive to my PC, and I have slaved it on the second channel to my DVD burner (primary channel has two HDDs). For some reason, the drive will only work in PIO mode (rather than DMA), so I am getting terrible transfer rates (10GB took just over 2 hours to transfer onto the new drive ). I have uninstalled the HDD controller, and let Win XP reinstall it, but it still says that it is using PIO transfer mode.

Would slaving the drive to the DVD burner be causing the slow speed, or something else?

For your information:

HDD: 200GB Western Digital Caviar
DVD: Pioneer DVDR107 (8x +/- DVD burner)

Thanks in advance

Daniel

PS I will try swapping the HDD and DVD over tonight, to see if that cures it, but if anyone has any other suggestions, I am more than willing to try.

 

Try running it with just the HDD as the master on the secondary IDE, remove the DVD burner. If your burner does not support DMA then its most probably dragging your HDD down by using PIO. Then try adding back the burner as the slave.


Have you tried setting the DVD burner to use DMA ?

 

Depends what mood the wifes in.

 

Yes; never install a fixed disk and a CD device on the same channel. Buy a seperate host adapter card if you have to.

Simon

 

Actually it shouldn't be a problem as long as DMA is turned off for the CD/DVD. If DMA is enabled for both then they will both run at the speed of the slower - DMA33 in other words. If DMA is off for the ATAPI device then the HDD should run normally.

In this case, have you looked at what BIOS says about the drive? You may need to manually enable DMA in BIOS.


M

 

Thanks for the suggestions...

It turns out it was caused by a dodgy IDE controller driver. I installed the latest (beta) version I found on the 'net, and it now sees the HDD as DMA100/133 and the DVD-RW as UDMA33

To test it I transfered 20GB of files over in 15 minutes, which sounds about right (certainly better than 5GB/hour previously).

Thanks again.

Daniel

[Edit - PS: What's the difference (if any) between UDMA and DMA? ]

 

Nothing really - UDMA is just the higher speeds - DMA100 and DMA133 (which latter isn't really an official spec at all, but marketing hype).


M

 

IMHO that isn't the case. If you have a disk drive & an optical drive on the same channel, the MASTER drive dictates the fastest transfer speed. Therefore you should have the disk drive as a Master.
Both drives will then run at their full DMA rates.

Darren