Controlling UDMA settings on Sata drives?

[Mark Timerding]

Can anyone tell me how to control/turn on UDMA mode on
my Sata drives?

I have a Asus K8V motherboard, with two Sata drives, (Drive C
is a WDC raptor, and the other sata drive is a seagate 80 gig Sata,
also I have two IDE drives connected. I am running XP Pro with
SP2.

Everythings been working fine for almost a year now, till I download
and tried SYSTEM Mechanic Pro 5, Soon as I tried using its defrag
option on the sata drives, they have steadily decreased UDMA5, to UDMA3,
to UDMA 2, and now, they show up as UDMA Not avail, using PIO mode.
(according to Everest Home Edition)

UDMA settings options are avail on the two IDE drives, but I have
none for the SATA drives. (in device manager) ... and I havent
seen any utiltily for setting UDMA for Sata either on VIA's
site, or WDC's.

This has never happened before. But now, it has, either because
of SP2 or the new System Mechanic 5 (or a combo of the two)
(I never had such a problem with Sys Mech 3 or 4)

Needless to say, without UDMA on my C (and D) drives, my
system with an AMD 3400 64 bit, and 1 gig Corsair XMS PC3200
ram, is running like my old PII 400mhz system.

Any advice out there?

 

[Paul]

Can anyone tell me how to control/turn on UDMA mode on
my Sata drives?

I have a Asus K8V motherboard, with two Sata drives, (Drive C
is a WDC raptor, and the other sata drive is a seagate 80 gig Sata,
also I have two IDE drives connected. I am running XP Pro with
SP2.

Everythings been working fine for almost a year now, till I download
and tried SYSTEM Mechanic Pro 5, Soon as I tried using its defrag
option on the sata drives, they have steadily decreased UDMA5, to UDMA3,
to UDMA 2, and now, they show up as UDMA Not avail, using PIO mode.
(according to Everest Home Edition)

UDMA settings options are avail on the two IDE drives, but I have
none for the SATA drives. (in device manager) ... and I havent
seen any utiltily for setting UDMA for Sata either on VIA's
site, or WDC's.

This has never happened before. But now, it has, either because
of SP2 or the new System Mechanic 5 (or a combo of the two)
(I never had such a problem with Sys Mech 3 or 4)

Needless to say, without UDMA on my C (and D) drives, my
system with an AMD 3400 64 bit, and 1 gig Corsair XMS PC3200
ram, is running like my old PII 400mhz system.

Any advice out there?

This is a "feature" of Windows. When errors are detected on a
disk interface, the transfer rate is cranked down a notch at
a time. I don't know enough about the protocols, in the case
of SATA, to know whether these are errors coming from the
media, or errors coming from packets travelling across the
cable.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/IDE-DMA.mspx

At least that is the basic idea - the cure may require more
than that article details.

With good ole SATA, it could even be a loose cable causing
you grief.

HTH,
Paul