another hard disk issue

bran new hard drive....same issue as old one ...VERY SLOW...transfer rates around 1-3mb/s

system is a: amd 1800+, 384mb of RAM, winBLOZE xp home, maxtor 6Y120L0 120GB 7200 RPM ultra-ata/133 Hard Drive set as master with no slave (tried cable select made no difference)

i noticed one thing....in the bios it sais PIO mode i have option to change from 0-5 and auto dont see anything in there anywhere about udma or whatever but the bios is suppossed to support it so is that the problem?
i have a sis5513 ide udma controller according to device manager and in it it shows it set as UDMA mode 6

ive disabled alot of the dum services xp comes with enabled..ive closed everything i possible can and its still slow.....tried defrag....formatted....tried FAT32 and NTFS....currently NTFS running outta ideas as ive tried everything ive found in google searches

im open to suggestions anyone?

p.s. if more sys info is needed i can look it up

 

PIO mode is most definitely the problem. What type of cable do you use? if the ide cable you use has only 40 wires on it, then it's the reason behind pio. it should have 80 wires. did the bios always have the same issue? or is it something you just noticed?

 

ive gotta few cables here ive tried different ones all the same....but im not 100% sure if ther 40 or 80 know anywhere i can find a screenshot of them to tell the difference?

 

*starts counting wires* lol

 

oh and the bios thing i just noticed it im pretty sure its always been like that

 

well it was a 40.....ive got like 5 cables lying around and 3 of them are 40s lol

ok im runnin total commander i dunno if anyone knows what this is but its a file manager wher eu can copy, move, delete etc....has a few other features..good program anyways,

it shows the speed of copying it starts out at around 10mb\s and ends stays around 5m/s still ALOT better then starting out at 2mb and ending up around 1mb but shouldnt it still be faster?

p.s. thnx for that link to tell the diff between cables

 

ok im downloading sandra thingy as i type this and yes i have the updated sis controller driver thingy.....(wow i have a good way with words eh lol)

ok i noticed something after i put the 80 cable in in the device manager it said UDMA Mode 2 instead of mode 6....i read about that somewhere and yer possed to uninstall it reboot and winBLOZE will reintsall it so i did..and it worked said UDMA Mode 6 now....but now im back at extremely slow speeds of 1-2mb/s :S

 

ok this is really starting to get frustraiting.....how can i change the udma mode in windows....when it was at udma mode 2 it worked alot faster then udma mode 6 its gotta be a windows problem maybe i should just do a quick format and reinstall since atleast now i got the 80 cable connected instead of the 40

 

SiS 5513 IDE UDMA Controller sais this
UDMA Mode 6

however Primary IDE Channel sais this

Current Transfer Mode: Not Applicable

so what the....i dont get it i hate winBLOZE xp

 

have it at DMA if available

tried uninstalling the devices and rebooted and let it reinstall them made no difference id say to hell with xp and goto 98 but if i remember correctly FAT32 doesnt like partitions over 32GB and on a 120GB drive thats hard to accomplish less then 32GB

 

ack ima try win98 hopefully i wont run into any 32gb issues

 

ok win98 wouldnt even work fdisk cant partition the drive its too big or something, so i tried xp home again

but before i did i messed around with bios settings apparently the power management HAS to be enabled for UDMA to work!...i dunno what one has to do with the other but ya its now working at UDMA Mode 5 i guess bios doesnt support mode 6 but thats ok i can live with 5

i used SANDRA to benchmark drive and it got 19MB/s
when i copy stuff with the drive max i ever got was 17MB/s but alot of the time its still around 5MB/s

i think i just need to tweak it some to get it higher weather i get it working or not thanks for the help