Trying to alter the UDMA number on my RAID 0 drives

J

John Smith

I suppose this is a hardware or a firmware question, but on the faint
chance that there's a Windows tweak that'll help me, I'll beg for help
here. I run WindowsXP on an MSI6398 motherboard. This board has an
embedded Promise SCSI controller with two connectors for hard drives.
(That's in addition to the regular two IDE controllers all PCs have).
It is supposed to run RAID 0 or 1 (1 I guess involves mirroring
drives). I've always (since 2002) only been interested in using them
to plug extra drive space on. I have a 40gig that I xferred from my
old PC and an 80gig I use for a backup drive. Recently I decided my 6
year old C: drive (IDE primary master) could use replacing, I'd been
getting some suspicious errors, I thought. I bought an 80gig Seagate
to replace the 80gig IBM that was in there. Since the IBM was just a
shade bigger, I couldn't image a backup onto the Seagate. Eventually I
discovered the MaxBlast5 cloning software and cloned onto the
Seagate-problem solved. But... somewhere along the way my little RAID
array went from a UDMA5 to a UDMA6 (Direct Memory Access speeds) on
both the drives on the Promise controller. Come to find out, my backup
software DriveImage7 didn't like this. Neither did Acronis when I
tried that. It gives Window Delayed Write errors and sends XP into a
nasty freeze. The Promise people couldn't help (but they did respond
to my email) and sicced me on MSI. Who can't be bothered with a
motherboard that old anyway. Anybody have any idea how I could get the
Promise controller to set that UDMA number back to 5? Or some memory
tweak that'll keep it from trying big caches on its writes?

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J

John Smith

In Windows Disk Management, I do a Properties on one of the Promise
disks and I have to unchecked boxes "Disable Tagged queuing" and
"Disable Synchronous Transfers". What the heck are these and would it
help my problem?
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