ATA-100 and W2K

[farid]

To my big surprise it would seem that Win2K does not support ATA-100 out of the box, it reverts to ATA-66 instead. A hotfix seems available whilst waiting for Win2K SP2, more info on the following URL. Am I ignorant, was this a well-known issue ?

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/artic
les/Q260/2/33.ASP

Farid

[farid]

http://support.microsoft.com/support.../Q260/2/33.ASP

[Dr Mordrid]

Yup. And it causes a problem with some VIA boards whose 4-in-1 drivers expect otherwise.

SP2 will be just like SP1; a near-total rewrite.

Dr. Mordrid

[LvR]

Hi guys

farid - it is actually ATA 33 and not even 66!

Maybe I dont know what I am talking about, but at the time of W2K release the current flavour of ATA was 33 and 66 (EIDE Mode 3 and 4) - on both mobos and drives at the time. I understood that Microsoft, at the time of W2K release, designed it such that EIDE mode 3 was the default - at the time it would seem to make sense, since most drives in production were still runing at Mode 3.

If one wished to run a drive at Mode 4 one has to "hack" the registry in order to change a key, in order to get the "support". The same goes for mode 5.

Now:

With the current designs of mobos and drives, mode 5 is the flavour of the month - AND IF THE MANUFACTURER OF YOUR MOBO KNOWS WHAT HE IS DOING, THE REQUIRED REGISTRY KEYS WILL BE CHANGED AT THE TIME OF DRIVER INSTALLATION (INF AND IDE DRIVERS).

Microsoft can surely not be expected to have implimented "support" for a technology that was still much under development at the time!.

I would therefore say it is not a W2K problem, but rather a demonstration of the inability of the mobo manufacturer to design properly working drivers.

Personally - running EIDE mode 5 on all 27 of my W2K machines that support this functionality - both Via and Intel based - without W2K SP2 or any manual registry "hacks" - Just the drivers from the manufacturers.

I suppose Microsoft will also be blamed when ATA 160 or whatever now comes along - I am sure it does not "support" that either.

------------------
Lawrence

[This message has been edited by LvR (edited 06 February 2001).]

[wkulecz]

I did a 640x480 29.97 fps AVI_IO capture recompressing to HuffYUV on w2k to a 7200 40G Maxtor last night with my PIII-500 ASUS P2B-D. Zero drops. This motherboard is "only" ATA33. TMPEGEnc made it into a very nice SVCD when viewed in WinDVD 2.3.

I fail to see the need for more "advanced" ATA interfaces. Perhaps if I had a "real-time" board like DV500 or RT2000, but I've a fasttrack66 raid in my dedicatd video editing system. I think the raid0 does far more than ATA33 vs ATA66, but I bought primarily to let smaller drives look like one seemless big drive as ATA33 hasn't yet been a limit for me.

I wouldn't do anything to get ATA66 or ATA100 "fully working" in w2k until something comes up short performance wise to prove you really need it. Just my old fashion "if it ain't broke don't fix it" attitude.

--wally.

[Dr Mordrid]

FWIW my Fasttrak100 array with four IBM 75GXP's writes about 5% faster in Win2K than Win98SE, even without ATA100 support. That's gotta tell you something....

Dr. Mordrid

[Bursar]

It should be a well known issue if you have ATA100 drives and want to get them running at full speed.

MS will gladly tell you where to get the fix from if you call them up and ask for it as I did.