My WD Raptor only runs at UDMA 33!

A

AlmightyBob

Geek Trainee
Yo,

I recently bought a 74G WD Raptor 'cos I'd heard good things. I have a VIA KT400, chaintech apogee deluxe mainboard which doesn't support SATA, so I bought an adpater from Manhattan which allows me to connect SATA drives to PATA boards...however, its only connected at UDMA 33 instead of 133 which is what my pervious IDE drive was connected at. Humph. The adapter supports UDMA133 transfer rates and is compatible with SATA150 drives.

This is a real bitch because I had been saving for a while for the raptor; they're not cheap...and it runs even slower than my older drive! Please somebody help! I have Xp home if its relevant....
 
Well, these PATA ->SATA adapters are typically frowned upon, usually for data corruption. I think it's partially due to the data having to be 'translated' from SATA to PATA.

Make sure you have DMA enabled on the IDE channel (Device Manager; expand IDE ATA Storage Controllers, go to Primary or Secondary IDE controller, double click, make sure it's enabled).

A better option would've been to snag a SATA controller card, install that and hook the SATA drive into that.
 
I agree, its converting a serial signal to a parallel one which as you can imagine causes performance problems. Get a SATA card and you should be ok.
 
Make sure you have an 80-conductor ribbon cable on the adapter, not a 40-conductor! Otherwise you will be capped at 33MHz.
 
Hey, thanks for the replys. So how does a controller card work; is it something which connects via a PCI slot? And about using an 80-conductor ribbon..when I boot, it says 'no 80 conductor cable installed' - although there is no cable at all because the adapter slots directly into the IDE port...would this imply that a couple of pins on the adapter are faulty?
 
No. If the wires were faulty, you'd be having troubles like booting problems and/or data corruption. All IDE cables are 40-pin. ATA33, 66, 100, 133, it doesn't matter. The IDE standard specifies 40-pin connections. However, with ATA66 and above, it became necessary to increase the wires for signal integrity sake. ATA33 is fine with a 40-pin, 40-wire cable, and will work fine with the faster drives. However, you'll be capped to ATA33 speeds because of this. The 40-pin, 80-wire cables are required if you have devices that are capable of faster speeds.

However, since you didn't seem to have this problem before, I'm leaning on my original assessment of it being the SATA -> PATA converter being the issue.
 
Nope, I wasn't having the problem before- so it seems that I'll have to buy a new card, as opposed to something simpler like updating the bios. Ah well. I've had a quick browse for SATA controllers, and some of them are fairly cheap which leads to an obvious question- if they allow you to use a SATA drive on a non-serial mboard, and they don't even taken up an IDE port, what's the point of adapters in the first place? Is there some catch? Thanks
 
AlmightyBob said:
Nope, I wasn't having the problem before- so it seems that I'll have to buy a new card, as opposed to something simpler like updating the bios. Ah well. I've had a quick browse for SATA controllers, and some of them are fairly cheap which leads to an obvious question- if they allow you to use a SATA drive on a non-serial mboard, and they don't even taken up an IDE port, what's the point of adapters in the first place? Is there some catch? Thanks
Click to expand...
Good question. Those SATA --> PATA adapters are nothing but trouble at this point, and simply buying a PCI SATA controller is definately the preferrable way to go! IMHO, Promise and Highpoint make the best PCI SATA controllers for home use.
 
Look for a "Boot Other Device" and see what you come up with. Off-hand, I'm not familiar with Chaintech's offerings, but if they follow other motherboard manufacturers, they should have something about booting off an extra device somewhere.

You will want to install the highpoint card first before you switch the drive over to the controller. Or you could just reinstall Windows...but, that's really unnecessary.
 
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