Second hard drive uncached speed problem

[Brent Beach]

Hi

I have a Dell Dimension 3000 which came with one drive.

I added a second drive from my previous machine, installed as a slave.
The ribbon cable that came with the Dell was for only one drive, so I
used the old ribbon cable as well.

After testing on the new XP machine I ended up reformatting and
repartitioning the old drive.

In a test using PC pitstop, the observed "Uncached speed" on this second
drive is only 2MB/s. On my previous machine it was around 25 MB/s.

What have I done wrong installing this new drive?

Brent

 

[Yves Leclerc]

Replace the cable with an 80 pin Ultra DMA cable. This is to ensure the
fastest speed on the IDE channel possible,

Slave drives are always slower than the master drives.

 

[Brent Beach]

Replace the cable with an 80 pin Ultra DMA cable. This is to ensure the
fastest speed on the IDE channel possible,

Slave drives are always slower than the master drives.

Thanks Yves.

A point of clarification.

The old cable on the old (500Mhz) machine - both drives fast.

The old cable on the new machine (2.4Ghz) same slave drive - master
fast, slave slow.

So, in spite of the cable working on the slow machine it can still be a
cable problem?

Brent

 

[Yves Leclerc]

YES! Newer PCs have Ultra DMA-enabled IDE ports. These require an 80
wire/40 pin Ultra DMA cable.