ATA 100 drive detects as ATA 33 - Tech Support Forums

ragtop · February 25th, 2002, 07:26 PM

I'm building a new machine for my brother & everything went well, except the Maxtor ATA 100 hard drive is detecting as an ATA 33 drive. Benchmarking the drive shows it to be a bit slow, apparently confirming that it is actually running at ATA 33 speeds.

FYI
- I used the 80 conductor cable that came with the drive.
- There's nothing else on that IDE channel
- I looked through their "Maxblast utilities" software, but didn't find anything for changing between ATA 100/66/33.
- DMA is enabled

Anyone have any suggestions??

Critical system specs:
- Shuttle AK31a MB
- XP 1800+
- 256 MB Kingston DDR
- Visiontek GF3 Ti200
- Soundblaster Audigy
- Maxtor 40 GB 7200 RPM HDD
- Afreey 50X CDROM
- Netgear NIC
- WIN 98SE

Dokeman · February 25th, 2002, 07:32 PM

make sure you have the right hdd cable. They look similar to your CDrom cables except there are twice as many cables in the cable. The cdrom has 40 little cables that make make up the cable and harddrive cables have 80 cables. And the HDD cables are usually gray and have one or more blues connectors on them. These are know as ATA 66/100/133 cables

SEALTEAMTHREE · February 25th, 2002, 07:33 PM

Have you tried contacting the respective manufacturers and looking into the possibility that you have a defective product? It sounds like either the drive or the motherboard is bad.

Inanis · February 25th, 2002, 07:41 PM

I have to agree with sealteamthree . . sounds like something defective . . although you may just need to enable UDMA100 support in the BIOS somewhere . . .

Tazman · February 25th, 2002, 07:43 PM

Ragtop -

I've never used that board but I checked out the manual here and scrolled to page 63. Check out the BIOS and see if UDMA is set to Auto. Hope it's that easy

.

Mike

poopeyhed2 · February 25th, 2002, 08:11 PM

On the ATA100 cable, usually the blue end into the mobo matters...

ragtop · February 25th, 2002, 08:14 PM

I'm definitely using the 80 conductor cable.

I'll double check the BIOS settings & run the manufacturer's diagnostic utility & see what I find.

kendo · February 25th, 2002, 08:17 PM

assuming you loaded the appropriate via drivers??? also the last new motherboard i bought had a bad 80 pin ribbon in the box (had a nick in it) caused all sorts of weird problems

Richard Cranium · February 25th, 2002, 09:07 PM

Maxtor offers a DOS utility to enable/disable some of the speed aspects of the drive.

If aged memory serves correct these are;

1. Sound Reduction causes slow performance, you can disable it.
2. ATA/100
3. DMA

It is a pure DOS utility and will need to boot up with a floppy then stick in the Maxtor .exe

amdkt7 · February 26th, 2002, 11:04 AM

Sounds like a bad drive to me.

But first check the bios settings, make sure the cable is on right, the blue end should go to the mother board.

Also some drives must be configured for cable select. Put the jumper on the CS position on all drives.

Try the drive on the controller all by it's self using cable select.

Question: Do you have another drive that works at ATA100? That would prove your mobo controller is ok.