hard drive performance

Maliy · Post by **Maliy** » Tue Aug 07, 2001 11:03 am

OK I have 2 hard drives one is maxtor 40gig 7200rpm ata 100 and the other 1 is maxtor 8.4gig 5400rpm udma66. I also have a cdrom and a cdrw. My configuration is cdrom-primary master, cdrw-secondary master on the motherboard. The motherboard is old (msi 5169) supports max udma33, so I put Promise card ata100 in there. At first I just made my 40gig hd master and 8.4gig hd slave all on 1 channel of the promise card. Worked pretty well didn't have any major problems, but then I realized putting 8.4gig hd on the same channel was not a good idea since it would slow down 40gig hd. Since Promise card has two channels I left 40gig as a master on one channel using the original promise cable ata 100 and put 8.4gig hd to the second channel also put it as a master but the cable i used was old one that i had i think udma33 just to see how well will the 40gig hd perform to see if there is a major difference. It turns out for the worse when i turn on the computer it tells me that I use a slow cable for the second hd and should replace it. Hard Drive led never lights up, and there are always some kind of timeouts. So my question is what would be an ideal configuration for my computer, should I just get another ata 100 cable and attach it to 8.4gig hdd? should i swithc 8.4gig hdd back to slave could that be causing the led not to light up? Or should I just put them back on one cable again?
Any suggestions would be great.

Maliy · Post by **Maliy** » Wed Aug 08, 2001 10:52 pm

any suggestions???

Murman · Post by **Murman** » Thu Aug 09, 2001 6:20 am

Just put your 40 gig on the promise controller and put your older drive back on the motherboard controller. See if that makes any improvments.

Maliy · Post by **Maliy** » Thu Aug 09, 2001 10:10 am

The problem with that is mother board controller is slower then Promise card controller, and i want to get the most out of my hard drive.

Maliy · Post by **Maliy** » Sat Aug 11, 2001 3:49 pm

ok I put both hard drives on a promise card on 2 different controllers both on 100ata cable. Pretty good performance but the problem is the hard drive led stoped working. Even if I go back to old configuration it doesn't work very weird. No suggestions from anyone? No hard drive Wizards in here?

Dragonmstr · Post by **Dragonmstr** » Sun Aug 12, 2001 7:01 pm

I think the problem in the light working is that it reads the motherboards controlers and not the promise cards. Personally the only thing the light tells you is the drive is being accessed so it shouldn't be any problem. Mine hasn't worked for months.

el bob · Post by **el bob** » Sun Aug 12, 2001 7:34 pm

Is the second hard drive working?

If the drive is working, then I would try replacing the LED.

If the hard drive isn't working then I would start troubleshooting.

Maliy · Post by **Maliy** » Sun Aug 12, 2001 9:50 pm

both hard drives are working fine the led lights during the post, but doesn't after that, also when running my AVP antivirus it would say I/O error on hard drive. This is starting to annoy me.