ATA/66 is slow

[Dave C]

BE6-II MB. 13 gig WD harddrive in win98. Hdtach, Sandra and winbench all report 2.6 Mbps burst transfer rate. I have the drive connected properly(correct 80 pin cable Also) and enabled in the bios. The highpoint bios is the most recent with the drivers current too. Most recent QJ bios for the mobo. All appears to be working but these benchmarks all report very low transfer rates. Anybody have any ideas, I am not quite ready to give up yet. I am not expecting miracles giving its an older drive and only 5400 rpm (and yes the drive has been enabled for ATA/66) but I would like a little more than 2.6. Any help would be appreciated as I really want to get this to work.

[Dave2]

Don't use the DMA 66. I used to have that motherboard and DMA 66 was much slower than DMA 33 and wasn't stable.

[Dave C]

yeah I have heard bad things about it. I am determined though. I managed to get it up to 10 Mbps by reverting to an older 1.11 driver set. I am not having any stability problems. It runs fine,just benchmarks terrible.

[Mulely]

I found this artical the other day and thought it might be of some intreast to you.
Scroll down to August 1999 third artical down, ATA-66 vs ATA-33.
www.storagereview.com/welcome.pl/http://www.storagereview.com/guide/guide_structures_cluster.html (http://www.storagereview.com/welcome.pl/http://www.storagereview.com/guide/guide_structures_cluster.html)

[arn]

Kinda sounds like you don't have any cache running. Also you didn't say anything about having the drivers installed in Windows.

In device manager under SCSI, do you have (2) "HighPoint Technology Inc. HTP366 Ultra DMA 66 Controller" statments without any yellow question or exclamation marks?

arn

[Dave C]

Arn, I do have the drivers loaded and the hpt controllers show up under the scsi with no yellow exclamation points. Since my last post I have gone all the way back to the 1.07 drivers and I am now getting 53.8 Mbps burst transfer. It seems the farther back I go in drivers the better performance I get. Strange huh? I sent an e-mail to highpoint about it, but so far they havent helped. They are trying to research it.
Mulely, thanks for the article. I have not had time to read through it yet, but I will.
Thanks to all,

Dave

[arn]

Your getting there. I just ran HDTach and it gave me a burst rate of 58.5. Cpu utilization of 3.3%. Could be the difference in the HDD themselves. I have an IBM 7200rpm.

I am using driver version 1.11. I looked for an upgrade but it didn't apply to me so I didn't update the drivers.

arn

[Dave C]

My drive is only a 5400 rpm so I wasnt expecting a whole lot, but I think I deserve better than 2.6. I just dont get why it gets worse the newer the drivers. I am pondering on an IBM 20.5 7200 deskstar. Anyone heard good or bad things?

[BFlurie]

That's like my ATI video card working faster & better the older the drivers got -- more compatible and/or not as much "junk" tacked on. Wonder what your OS would "detect" and install during a "clean" install? For SCSI maybe an "unknown" device, but it might have a named driver that would give you the best performance.

BF