Maxtor SATA 150 adapter performance problem with Vista

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After upgrading my PC from Windows XP to Vista I noticed terrible performance
when transferring data to or from a pair of IDE drives connected to a Maxtor
SATA 150 PCI adapter. The performance monitor showed a burst of activity for
a few seconds every minute on a very regular basis. I reverted to the
Windows XP drivers that came with the adapter and now performance is fine.

Anyone else experienced this problem or is it unique to my computer?
 
Same here. Any disk request would take forever using the Vista SATA driver.
I also reverted to the XP Maxtor drivers and everying runs fine.
 
How do you revert back to the old drivers?

I am having similar problems. I have a maxtor 6v300f0 300gig hard disk and
vista takes 2 minutes to read a file on that disk. But it works fine under
windows xp.

I cant even find the drivers at the maxtor website.

Can someone please help?
 
Drivers for a disk drive ? - What motherboard/chipset does your PC
use ? Modern PCs have configurable settings for SATA controllers.
Since Vista supports AHCI ( Advanced Host Controller Interface )
how is your BIOS setup configured ? ( Native or AHCI ). Have you
used any simple benchmarking tool to determine the drive's performance ?
Have you tested the drive's condition to see if it's marked as "Dirty" ?

AHCI enables the use of Native Command Queuing and some other
features.
 
On Sat, 24 Mar 2007 08:34:19 -0700, William Lim <William
How do you revert back to the old drivers?

I am having similar problems. I have a maxtor 6v300f0 300gig hard disk and
vista takes 2 minutes to read a file on that disk. But it works fine under
windows xp.

I cant even find the drivers at the maxtor website.

Can someone please help?
Click to expand...

Generally what driver gets loaded is determined in part by what your
BIOS "sees" when you first boot your system. I have posted many
threads on the trials and tribulations I've had with my SATA drives,
thanfully my Vista install is on a IDE ATA drive, not a SATA.

For me, I know I have both IDE ATA and SATA drivers on my system. What
happens is I control which get loaded by changing the settings in my
BIOS. If I disable SATA, (in BIOS) then the IDE ATA drivers get loaded
and that's reflected in what's seen in Windows Device Manger. If I try
to enable SATA mode then a totally different set of drivers get
loaded, are seen by Device Manager and even the BIOS copyright screen
is totally different.

So if your drives are running very slow, you may wish to try a
different configuration in BIOS, just write down how all the relevant
settings were before changing in case you got to go back and if you
haven't already, first look for and install any new drivers from your
motherboard or vendor's web site for your MB's chipset, various
controllers and you may even want to download and install a newer
version of your BIOS if one is avaliable.

Another part of the puzzle is often what RELEASE version you have of
your motherboard or other hardware. For example others have said they
have the same model MB I do and don't have the SATA problems I have,
perhaps because they have a later VERSION of the motherboard. I have
version 1.0 which is the first release, which may be why no matter
what I try my SATA drives still don't work as they should. ;-(

This is also a common reason why some DVD burners don't work. The
firmware needs to be updated.
 
Wow thanks for the fast replies. Maybe I should have provided more
information for you before.

Anyway I have three SATA harddrives. Before I installed vista, I had a
Western digital and a maxtor in there. I used the maxtor primarily to keep my
mp3s. I took out the maxtor and put in a new western digital harddisk to
clean install vista while keeping my windows xp on the other western digital
harddisk. So that I could transfer files onto the new vista harddisk

Ok everything worked fine. Vista was up and running and I could transfer
some of my files from the older western digital to the new one. (my computer
case only has space for 2 harddisks.

So I wanted to take out the older western digital and have my maxtor in
there. When i put it in and boot up windows the first thing it does is look
for drivers for the maxtor harddisk. It didnt do that with the western
digital. But anyway I didnt think much of it. Went to windows explorer and i
could see the harddisk. But when i try to open a file it takes a really long
time for each file and would somtimes cause the explorer to stop responding.
I turned off caching and indexing for that disk but it is still slow.

I thought maybe i damaged the harddisk because I was moving it around alot
when switching harddrives. But I took out my harddisk with vista and put in
my harddisk with xp. Booted up xp and everything was fine. I didnt see any
problems with transferring or opening files in the maxtor. so i transfered
some of my mp3s to the older western digital and the transfer rate was fast.

Been switching between vista and xp a couple of times and still the maxtor
acts like crap on vista but runs fine in xp. I even tried running the SATA
cable to another sata port.

So since it can still work under xp. It shouldnt be a bios problem should it?
 
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