Why's my Maxtor 40 ATA66 7200 slow?

[Raycaster]

I've traded up from my CUSL2 to go for a A7A266 with Athlon 1.333GHz.

Along the way my Maxtor 40G ATA66 7200 RPM drive slowed to a crawl. Not sure if it was damaged in the transfer but the Max Diagnostic says its fine. I've tried other drives and they seem fine.

I benchmarked the HD at 3.25Mb/s in Win98se as the drive is using a ATA100 cable and Master alone on the IDE 0 channel.

I'm stumped..

4 hours later...

ok, almost solved problem.
Steps taken:
1) Installed Win2000 from scratch and applies all service packs and updates.
2) Test speed .... Hey 16Mb/s, thats more like it!
3) Installed Ali UltraDMa drivers etc and enabled. I did this hoping the FASTEST AMD chip available would provide for 0 dropped frames when capturing video, (still dropping).


Result:

Maxtor now has transfer rate of 1.25Mb/s.

Win 2000 & Win 98SE
A7A266 Asus Motherboard
1.333 Athlon & 512M DDR ram
40G Maxtor ATA66 7200 RPM HD
Matrox Marvel G400
Dlink 530TX+ NIC

[F4_Hunter]

Do you have DMA enabled in device mangler?

[DanU]

This is probably unlikely but it's worth mentioning anyway....

Have you checked your BIOS to make sure that your hard drive interface isn't set to use PIO modes?