Bad hard drive performance

[El_Brio]

I have a uATA 66 Quantum Fireball HD. I used to use it with a Promise 66 pci hard drive controller and it semed to work OK. I recently upgraded to a MSI k7t pro 2 which has onboard support for uata66/100. After getting everything running I noticed my hd was noticeable slower. I didn't think much of it until I started up my file destruction program to erase some confidential reconds and noticed that it was MUCH slower.

I ran the Sandra benckmarking program and apparently it is running a little bit slower than an ATA 33 drive. What gives? Sometimes Sandra will crash while running the test. Do I need a new HD or am I missing something here?

Thanks for the help,
El_Brio

[daverme]

Well, it's obviously the mobo and NOT the hard drive. Does this mobo have an on-board RAID controller? If so, is it the RAID controller that actually provides the ATA/66 support? My ABIT BX133-RAID is like that, as are many others: If I plug into the std IDE pri or sec controllers, I'm limited to ATA/33 but if I plug into the pri or sec RAID controllers then I can get ATA/100. (The RAID controller will support non-RAID configurations.)

[El_Brio]

Nope. Not a raid.

[AndreRIO]

ok, did you enable dma box? i had a similar problem with my wd hd. sometimes disabling in cmos and enabling it will solve the problem in win2k. what os are you running?

[Lancelot2]

I have an A7V mobo with the Promise contoller and have 3 hard drives. Two are WD 8 gig drives attached to my Primary Ide channels which show the DMA box checked and my other HD is a WD 30 gig ATA100 7200 drive connected to the Promise controller but it doesn't show having a DMA check box like the other 2 drives but shows a check in the int13 box. Is this usual. Should the ATA 100 drive also have a DMA box or not.
Under both Sandra and HD Tach the ATA 100 drive is much faster.

[El_Brio]

I will try to disable in CMOS and enable in win98 to see if it helps. Ill post resuls later.