New HDD, slow disk access

[merlin_the_magician]

Added a new HDD to my sytem last week, since the old one is about to crash.

The old one still works for the moment, so i descided to hook up both of them, to make data transfer more easy.
Works fine, just disk access (to both drives) seems to be a little slow. Could this be the controller not being capable enough to handle both drives smoothly?

[PhilEnfield]

How did you configure the drives ? ... (i.e. channels/mstr/slave) & what else is on there ?

Check that DMA is set in Device Manager/IDE ATA/Atapi Controllers

[merlin_the_magician]

Primary master = Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 80Gb
Primary slave = Maxtor DiamondMax 6 40Gb

Secondairy master = DVD ROM
Secondairy slave = CDRW

Never looked at DMA settings really. Should it be enabled for all drives when possible?

[PhilEnfield]

Yep ...... DMA is Direct Memory Access ... this allows drive activities, without using too much in the way of PC resources. Normally it would be good to have all set to DMA if available.

Looking at your configuration, it might be that there is too much going on on the Primary Channel. It might be worth switching the 40gb drive to the Secondary Channel and see if this speeds things up.

[Lazza]

Yep, on HD's it should be DMA mode 5 and IDE optical drives it should be DMA mode 2.

Just check on your IDE channels in device manager to see, should be right. Oh and make sure you don't have either of your HD's jumpers set as "Cable Select" too.

[merlin_the_magician]

Jumper settings are set as master and slave, by the book

I'm going to check DMA channels first. Maybe set both HDD's to master, and optical drives to slave if it still does not improve

[PhilEnfield]

Maybe set both HDD's to master, and optical drives to slave if it still does not improve
Yep that's what I would try.