need help w/ hard drive transfer rate

S

shadezula616

New Member
ok so i have 3 hard drives, 2 internals (c & d) and an external (h). i've been trying to move a lot of files to d but when i transfer it will take 10 or so minutes to transfer just one 700mb video file! i have tried from c to d as well as h to d. i can transfer fine between c and h, takes about 20 seconds for the file either way, but i dont know whats up w/ this one. i've defragmented it, error checked it, and finally i just completely formatted it so there is nothing on it at all and it still wont work.
These are my specs:
Dell Dimension DIM4600
Intel Pentium 4 Processor 2.66 GHz
512 MB RAM
XP SP3
C: Maxtor 6E040L0
D: ST340810A
H: WD 320 Gb MyBook

If someone could help me out it would be greatly appreciated! THANK YOU!
 
Check to make sure the drive controller is not running in PIO mode. Go to device manager and check the properties of all your ATA controllers and on the advanced settings tab make sure they are all set to DMA if available.
 
i checked it and one of the drives is set on pio. it is device one on the primary ide channel but it is set for DMA if available.....what should i do?
 
Switch the PIO entry to DMA. There should be 2 entries per IDE controller. If the one you are looking at says DMA if available and you know there is a PIO drive then you are probably looking at the wrong one.

I don't remember if you need to reboot or not after switching.
 
i cant change it though.....the transfer mode is already set to DMA if available....apparently its not available though....is there another way to change it or can i fix it and like put DMA on it or something?
 
The other place it might be is in the BIOS, I don't think a Dell BIOS will give you that control though it never hurts to look.
 
there didnt seem to be anything i could do in bios.......any other suggestions? thanx for helping btw............but that pio thing is def. the problem then?
 
If the drive is set to PIO then yes that is defiently the problem.

The fastest PIO transfer rate is around 25MB/s though I don't know if any hard drives support that spec, ATA-2 (PIO mode 4) is 16.7MB/s.

I'm assuming this is a not your primary hard drive? If you can, try switching it to the other IDE controller, if you have 1 CD/DVD drive connect it to the other connector on that cable. If you have 2 drives disconnect one temporarily and connect the drive there and see if it drops to PIO as well.
 
well i just did that and yes it is still pio.....is there no fixing to the problem then or is there something else i can try doing?

thank you very much =)
 
I don't think there are any jumpers to limit the drives speed to PIO but it doesn't hurt to check.

I know that your drive (the Seagate 40GB, 5400RPM) is an ATA/100 drive so it should support faster speeds. You aren't using an old 40 conductor cable or something are you? This shouldn't make it PIO but it will limit it to ATA33 which is still quite slow.
 
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