Maxtor Harddrive problem

[EliC]

I just built a new computer with the Tyan Trinity 400 MB and a Maxtor 20.4GB ATA66 HD. I am having 2 problems with the HD.

First, the harddrive is only running at ATA33. How do I fix this? It is set up as the master on the primary IDE controller with no other drives on that contoller.

Second, Windows98 is reporting the size of the drive as 19GB instead of 20.4. Is this correct or do I need to do something to fix this? I know that there are differences in reported size but 1.4GBs?

[cyphen]

Yep, that's exactly right. Consider that the industry decided (for sales reasons) to define 1 GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes, whereas a computer defines 1 GB as 2^30, or 1,073,742,824 bytes. so 20,400,000,000 bytes divided by 1,073,741,824 bytes per gig equals 18.999 computer gigabytes.

About the ATA 33 thing, do you have an ATA 66 cable attached? it's not the standard 40 pin ribbon coable, it's an 80 pin ribbon cable. Also, does the Tyan MB support ATA 66? Also bear in mind that PC magazine did a comparison on 33 vs 66, and for the Maxtor drives, they came out almost identical. This is to say that they outshined most of the competition at 33, but had no real gains at 66, where they also still outshined most of the competition. The 66 interface really only speeds up the read from the hard drives cache, which is only 2 MB anyway. The drive itself internally only operates at 33. Also, this is the thoeretical peak performance. In real life circumstances, it won't reach that, and definitely won't sustain that.

[EliC]

Yes, the Tyan Trintiy 400 supports ATA66. I am using the cable that came with the maxtor drive. I assumed that is was the correct one as it was the only one (very little documentation with the drive). The motherboard came with 2 differnent IDE cables. The other one may be a ATA66 cable, but once again there was no documentation to indicate this. I will check that possibility tonight.

[EliC]

There are a total of 3 cables that came w/ the board. 2 ide and one floppy

[daveleau]

The one with the blue end is the ATA66 cable. I am not sure if both the slave and the master are capable of ATA66 on that cable but I would assume they both are.
Dave

[bmckay55]

Also, double check your manual. I think the blue end should go into the ide connector on the motherboard, the black end into the hard drive. By the way. I have one of those. Nice drive. Quiet and fast.

[Ygor]

Usually the 2 cables that come with a motherboard include a floppy drive cable and a hard drive cable.

[RPB]

Elic i also have a maxtor drive that was sold as a retail kit 13.6 gb but contained a 15.3 gb drive. it is on an ms-6167 athlon and it gave the no 80 conductor cable message with the cable installed corectly blue end to mainboard and black to drive. I tried the cable with the black end on the mainboard and blue end on the drive and it fixed it, ata 66 !!! So i used the tech form on maxtors web site and they sent me an email saying that (thats the normal fix for that problem)