Slow Barracuda. Help Please!

[Aussieguy]

Cool Site Guys! Anyway Im only getting about 7MB/sec out of my Seagate Barracuda ST340016a (40GB 7200rpm) and dont know why. Its about 12 mnths old and already has a couple of bad sectors that im not happy about but what can you do?

Athlon XP2500+ (not oc'ed!)
ASUS A7N8X-X Mobo (latest drivers and BIOS)
512meg DDR 333 RAM (single stick)
GForce 2 64 MMX400
Seagate 40GB
Maxtor 10GB (Old but still good!)
Windows 98se

Could it be a driver problem?
"GENERIC IDE DISK TYPE 47" is what device mangler says. DMA settings? How do I find?change them? Windows also says my SCSI ATAPI/IDE driver is missing when I dont even have a SCSI drive??? I've got the right ribbon cables on as well. Any help appreciated.
:rolleyes:

[Drake]

:D:DWELCOME:D:D to Liquid Ninjas, Aussieguy

I can't help you with your problem, but I'm sure somone else knows what's gone wrong :)

[mdzcpa]

Did you load the latest NF2 drivers?

The SCSI driver missing is referring to the driver for the Promise SATA controller. If you're not using it, disable it in the BIOS.

Any odd sounds coming out the drive?

[Aussieguy]

Hi, drive sounds fine, quiet, yes I downloaded the latest board drivers from ASUS, and ran the install twice just to make sure (ew . . . was that bad?).
The A7N8X-X dont have SATA support anyway.
(Nor does it have dual channel DDR like the other versions of this board so buyer beware!)

When I install the PC Probe Utility (Asus) it cant find the temp monitor chips (LM75?) either. . .but this is probly a totally unrelated problem. . .

Stupid machine.
Appreciate the help.
:D

[unacceptable_risk]

G'day Aussie, Welcome to LN!!!!

SATA (serial ata) you dont have it so if it can be disabled, take mdzcpa's advice and disable in bios.

I am seriously worried about the dual channel ram story. I was about to go and buy one tomorrow, and have set another one up for a mate in the last couple of weeks. I can find it claimed in writing by retailers, but the asus site is mysteriously cagey about it. The chipset has it, but does the board support the function? I am yet to find out.

I had little time to build my mates box and when it said single channel mode on bootup, I just figured I had the 2 chips in the wrong slots and I didn't have time to tweak.

I am pretty sure the chips need to be in slots 1 and 3 for dual operation..(correct me if I'm wrong guys..) can you check your setup please, I am eager to know what the go is here. I will look at a false advertising suit if this is true.

As for your HD, sadly I have never heard a nice word about newer seagate drives, and your story is all to common, slow failure prone. however, the problem may be simple. Is there by chance another device piggybacked on the same ide cable? eg older 10 gig or cdrom. If so, try it without.

Cheers, _UR_

[sptw]

Hi Aussieguy,

Welcome to the board :)

Before doing anything, download SeaTools Desktop Edition (http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/B7a.html).It creates a self-booting diskette.Boot wih this diskette and run the program once, and check if the drive is ok.Probably you'll can find an option in this self-booting diskette named "Low Level Format".It will correct the "bad sectors" problem, but remember to make a backup of your datas before hit yes.This operation erases your your datas.
A couples of bad sectors use to slowdown the performance of Hard discs.

[Aussieguy]

There is no SATA option in the BIOS to turn off is what I should have said.
This version of the board (A7N8X-"X") does not support dual channel RAM.
But the "Deluxe" and the VM (?) versions do. (This is on the ASUS site somewhere). But the vendor who sold it to me said it only makes about 3% speed increase anyway and sold me a 512 stick.
If you do want (and can) use dual channel the two RAM sticks must be exactly the same and stuck in slots 1 and 2. Putting another one in the third slot stops it.

Think I might have found some cause of the slow HDD. I have an older 10GB fujitsu (not a maxtor) slaved on the same ribbon as the Barracuda which might be slowing it down. Will unplug it and see if it goes faster. Then might slave the CD to the fujitsu in IDE slot 2. (Is this OK?) I have to make the fujitsu master and boot from HDD 0 (Baracuda)in the BIOS.
Tell me if Im wrong anywhere.
Ran scandisk as well and found 72,ooo,ooo (or so) bytes in hidden folders and some other stuff as well.
Seagate Drives wont be on my buy list anymore!
Thanks all.

[Player0]

Sounds like your drive is running in compatibility mode (being accessed through BIOS INT13 commands, slow). Ie, its not running in direct access mode. Thats why Windows shows it as Generic Type 47.

The missing SCSI ATAPI/IDE driver is the cause of this. Your board only has standard IDE slots. No SATA or RAID. So the only possible thing missing is the NVidia IDE Drivers. The motherboard drivers haven't been installed properly, or your missing one of the drivers.

http://www.asus.com/products/mb/socketa/a7n8x-x/overview.htm#

The slowness is a Windows Drivers problem (what version). Most versions of windows dont have native NForce support, so you need to ensure you properly install the drivers.

The bad sectors can be corrected like SPTW said. The other drives may cause a problem, you can try to disconnect the other drives, but I dont think its the only problem.

Hidden folders is nothing to worry about. That doesnt mean a problem.

[Aussieguy]

Thanks Player0
I unplugged the slave HDD and it didnt make any difference.
So you were right threre.

I ran Sea Tools and it didnt find any problems. (Thanks sptw)
Can anyone advise me the best way to install the board drivers?
I have the latest ones from ASUS.
And I have run the installl .exe already.
(twice actualy)
Should I just try again?

Or should I "remove" specific items from the device manager and let Windows find and install them again?

[unacceptable_risk]

Curses to ASUS, you're right about that missing dual channel feature. I contacted the place I bought one from a couple of weeks ago, where it is advertised as having the feature. They will happily swap for a similarily priced gigabyte 7N400-L1 that does include the dual ram feature. The only visible thing to my disliking about the GB board is its lack of cpu bracket holes, however the pc is for a friend who is not a keen OC'er

Can anybody comment on that Gigabyte mobo? And whether the speed diference of dual channel is worth the bother?

P.s. why would ASUS leave that feature off its middle range board? The cheap shonky #$%^&@*!!! thats it. Between the dodgy 200mhz??? ram they hobbled their FX5200 offering with and this board that doesnt even engage the features that made its chipset so popular. I'm over ASUS completely.

[Player0]

Im not familiar with Nforce2 drivers, im not sure what the options are or how they install their bus mastering drivers.

Someone else will need to walk you through that one.

[sptw]

Hi Folks,

There are no IDE drivers from Nvidia yet.Nforce2 and Nforce1 still using a IDE driver supplied from Microsoft, that in my opinion sucks.MS IDE drivers are not optimised for nForce IDE controller.Some people are happy with this and some not.I have seeing a lot of problems with IDE ports on Nforce2.A few time ago Nvidia released a 2.41 set drivers that used to come with Nvidia IDE drivers, but it gave a lot of headache for some users, and they decided to pull-out the drivers untill they could get it to be stable.A few days ago Nvidia released a new set of the drivers : 2.45 version, but in accord with a little note there: NVIDIA accelerated IDE drivers are not included in this release.
About the dual-channel support in this mobo (a7n8x-x) you're right.There's no support for this.ASUS don't make it clear in manual or even in his site.The only way to discover about this is in the manual, page 14, item 3: "This memory technology supplies data trasfer rates up to 3.2 GB/s for 400MHZ DDR Sdram and 2.7 GB/s for 333MHZ DDR Sdram."For a dual-channel it goes for 6.4GB/s.Very smart they are :mad: .For a name as ASUS, it's sucks.The best deal for users would be :"There is no support for Dual-Channel in this motherboard".
Aussieguy, although the nforce mobos use to use a lot of bandwidth, i can't believe that the slow down performance of your seagate drive is related to this problem of only one channel memory.It seems for me that there is something wrong with your drivers.If i were you i would try a fresh windows installation.Sorry, but for now, i can't see no other way to fix your problem.BTW, how did you get this 7MB/sec?Which benchmark program did you use?Are you talking about 7MB/sec on reading or writing operation?Well.... only for you know, i have a nforce1 mobo that the maximum performance on writing operation is 20MB/sec, and there's nothing i can do, only waiting for a new set of IDE drivers from Nvidia.

[Aussieguy]

Installed latest drivers for my mobo and im getting around 40mb/sec now.

I can live with that.

Used Diskspeed32 to measure (but it crashes halfway through, probly some background task)

Thanks sptw.

:) :D :cool3: :rolleyes: