WD ATA-66 Disk has no performance of ATA-66

[flyingdisk]

Hi,
I have a Western Digital 12GB harddisk, which should be ATA-66 compatible. I have a motherboard with PIII-800 CPU and built-in ATA-100 compatible IDE interface. I am also using the 80-pin connection cable designed for ATA-66. However, a benchmark shows that it can never read or wirte more than 7MB/Sec.
I checked the Win98 control panel and the DMA is not set. After I have the DMA checked, the disk runs just a little bit faster (barely 8MB/Sec) and crashes soon. I had tried twice and everytime I ended up with reformating my harddisk since the FAT was totally messed up.
Any help would be appreciated to bring my HD up to the ATA-66 performance. Thanks.

[chaser_22]

Hello, just wondering if you have anything else connected to your ide ribbon cable. If you have a cd-rom player and a harddrive on the same ide channel it can cause problems. The speed of the slowest device on it will be taken. That's what I've experienced.
It's best to have HDD and cd-rom drives on different ide-channels.
Also you may want to look on post up what your system is saying about the interface it's using for your HDD, in other words, which UDMA ? If it's telling you a lower speed, like PIO4 you need to set the right setting in BIOS.

[BipolarBill]

The early WD ATA/66 drives had to have 66 enabled with the WD Ultra ATA Manager (http://ctweb01.wdc.com/datalifeguard/lifeguardextend.asp?destination=http://support.wdc.com/download/dlg/dlgudma.zip). Try that.

[flyingdisk]

:) Thank you so much. It seems that the Western Digital disk management does work. The speed is still far from the 66MB/sec burst though -- the system monitor reports a peak at 2.4MB/sec. It was under 1MB/sec. Thank you again.