A7V Promise ATA100 slower than onboard Via ATA66?!!

[WereWolf]

When I hook up my Maxtor 20Gig ATA100 drive to the Promise controller, I get these weird pauses when loading, for example, Unreal Tournament...
When I hook up to the Via controller, everything seems A LOT faster, and the pauses have gone with the wind!
What gives?!
I would have thought the Promise controller would at least be a little faster...but it's not!

BTW, I tried all the BIOSSES, and drivers, including build 25.

[Raptor^]

This seems to have cropped up several times already, people seem to think its a problem with the drivers for the Promise controller.

Seeing as ATA100 is just a marketing gimmick and has such a tiny performance increase over ATA66 with current drives, just leave it on the 66 controller.

[Gurm]

Raptor,

Are these problems also prevalent with the Promise Ultra66 drivers? Or just the Ultra100?

And is it just the latest drivers?

- Gurm

P.S. MAXTOR.... AAAAAAAAAAAGGGGHHHHH!

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[This message has been edited by Gurm (edited 01 November 2000).]

[Greebe]

There are known issues with Maxtor drives with Promise controller. The problem is with the HD's. I'm not super current on the situation with them but do know that there is this issue. I've installed a few Promise IDE raid arrays and IBM's HD's work very well together.

[Helevitia]

I have the A7V w/ Maxtor ata/100 7200rpm, 2MB buffer HDD's and haven't had any problems like that at all. As a matter of fact, the performance gain I get appears to be 10Mbps faster than my ata/66 HDD. With ATA/100, I peak at 70Mbps and average 30Mbps. With my ATA/66 drive I peak at 60MBPS and average 20Mbps.

Dave

[UncleJoe]

No probs with A7V onboard Promise controller & IBM 30 Gig GPX75 ... (Only sad thing is that i haven't found (yet) any linux distribution able to support that...)


-J-

[Greebe]

Dave, it's on their slightly dated drives (between the 10 and 20 gig ranges???)

[Helevitia]

I wonder when mine was manufactured because I have two 20gig drives.

Dave

[alessandro]

Me too, no problem with Promise on board controler with a IBM Deskstar 75GXP 15Gb UATA/100.

HDTah 2.61 gives me:

10.5ms Random Access Time

80mb Read Bust speed

Max 37423Mb/sec
Min 29130Mb/sec
average 33276.5

CPU usage 4.5%

Get the latest drive from the promise site.

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Athlon Thunderbird 1.1Ghz Socket A 256Kb,Asus A7V dipswitch,GlobalWin FOP32-1, 17" Sony Multiscan 200PST,128MB PC100 ram,Matrox Millenium G400 MAX 32MB 5ns SGRAM,IBM Deskstar 75GXP 15Gb UltraATA/100, Quantum Firebal EL 10.2Gb,Epson Stylus Color 740,Sound blaster Live!,Cambridge Soundworks 5.1,Creative PC-DVD 5X,CDR-RW Ricoh MP7040S@MP7060S(Tweaked from 4x--->6x with no problem),Adaptec SCSI 2920C,Diamond SupraExpress 56e PRO,Iomega Zip Drive.

[WereWolf]

Well, it's crap on my system...
the speed is ok, but it's the strange pauses that kill it for me...

I hope they can fix this with a BIOS/driver update...

otherwise, well, at least asus is a little richer thanks to me...

$250 for a mainboard with bogus ATA100 (except you lucky%@$^%@#^ with IBM drives)

I'm starting to think making harddrives is what IBM does best!

PS: Maxtor/Promise - AAAARRGGHHHHH

[Helevitia]

Werewolf,

I mean no dis-respect, but why would none of us have problems but somehow you think a bios/driver update will fix the problem? I think it is your computer and you need to re-evaluate what you have done, installed, removed, etc...

Dave

[Gurm]

I've said it before and I'll say it again...

Maxtor = GARBAGE.

Western Digital is now made by IBM, which leaves just IBM and Quantum as the kickass drive manufacturers, and IBM is quieter... which gets my money.

- Gurm

[Helevitia]

Gurm,

Maxtor bought out Quantum's HDD division a few weeks back. Sounds like only IBM is left

Dave

[Raptor^]

Yeap, actually reading back over some old threads on the sharky extreme forums, it seems this problem only does show up with Maxtor drives...

Someone posted with this problem and said they had a Maxtor drive, couple of other people said they saw it too. Nobody said they were OK, so I assumed it was a general problem.

I still stand by my original comment though - ATA 100 is nothing more than a marketing ploy right now and you will not be able to tell the difference between the ATA66 and ATA100 controller.

[Gurm]

Oh come on. ATA66 is "just a marketing ploy" as well, since the current crop of Ultra66 drives only has a sustained throughput of 20MB/s (give or take) anyway!

And frankly, I'm still not convinced the Promise Ultra66 runs better than the BX's Ultra33... since the BX is so very well tweaked by now. I mean, I know the Ultra66 runs faster bursting (I've seen benchmarks, and it "feels" faster bursting), but under a heavy load I almost think the BX is better still.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.