Disc Management

[Richard Adams]

On Saturday I was up at a friend's, building a PC for him. Nothing
ostentatious, but with some power and room to grow. 2 Seagate 250GB
Barracuda drives connected to SATA 1 & SATA 2. Not doing any RAID,
just want a pair of discs.

They are both recognised by the BIOS and are visible in set-up, but in
Control Panel -> System it doesn't know anything of the second drive.
It's nearing midnight and I'm very much disgusted when I look to see if
Control Panel -> Administration Tools has anything.

Hello. Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management. It /does/
see the second drive.

Between Device Manager -> Disk drives -> ST(drive model) -> properties,
IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers and Disk Management I'm able to get this
phantom drive partitioned and formatted. Next boot it's there and I'm
able to access it.

I guess I'm puzzled why Disk Management isn't under System.


I've had a problem with adding a second SATA drive to my own home
computer and it's been sitting there, spinning for months without me
able to utilise it. Disk Management to the rescue, now I have my full
compliment of drives accessible at home.

If only I could find out why my primary boot drive continues to run at
PIO speeds, even though it states DMA if availible. Any clues how to
force this to use DMA or are channels used up when you add SATA drives?

 

[Paul]

On Saturday I was up at a friend's, building a PC for him. Nothing
ostentatious, but with some power and room to grow. 2 Seagate 250GB
Barracuda drives connected to SATA 1 & SATA 2. Not doing any RAID,
just want a pair of discs.

They are both recognised by the BIOS and are visible in set-up, but in
Control Panel -> System it doesn't know anything of the second drive.
It's nearing midnight and I'm very much disgusted when I look to see if
Control Panel -> Administration Tools has anything.

Hello. Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management. It /does/
see the second drive.

Between Device Manager -> Disk drives -> ST(drive model) -> properties,
IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers and Disk Management I'm able to get this
phantom drive partitioned and formatted. Next boot it's there and I'm
able to access it.

I guess I'm puzzled why Disk Management isn't under System.


I've had a problem with adding a second SATA drive to my own home
computer and it's been sitting there, spinning for months without me
able to utilise it. Disk Management to the rescue, now I have my full
compliment of drives accessible at home.

If only I could find out why my primary boot drive continues to run at
PIO speeds, even though it states DMA if availible. Any clues how to
force this to use DMA or are channels used up when you add SATA drives?

(See "Workaround" section)
"IDE ATA and ATAPI disks use PIO mode after multiple time-out or CRC errors occur"
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;817472

And for fun, this util will do a read benchmark. If the result is a
flat line, you are transfer rate limited. If the result is a tilted
line, with more bandwidth at the beginning of the disk, than at
the end, then you are (properly) media limited by the disk. A flat
line at about 4MB/sec, would be a typical bottom of the barrel PIO result.

http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php?request=HdTach

Paul