PLEASE-Help on hard disk setup in the bios!

[vwrabbit81]

Please help.I have this problem,i have 2 hard disk,but i think they are working slowly,cause i use a benchmark program and it said they have near 3 Mb/sec write and read(I think they have to have 16 mb/sec write-read,or i am wrong?).

So i tried to fix it in the bios,so i put pio-4 for each drive and save to cmos and exit,but after exit,in the first screen(the screen where you can see what you have in the computer,hdd`s,fdd`s,memory,name of processor,and etc.)i see the 2 hdd`s with pio-0 and something like ATA N/D.(Why it is not available??)

My question is how can i manage to use the hdd`s with pio-4 or try to help working more fast than they are now.

Another question:i think the hdd`s supports dma(and i have ticked dma in the contoller properties)how can i manage to use it in dma,i need a different ide cable???(Cause i saw in some forums that they talk about a 40 pins and 80 pins cable,what is the difference between them???)

I appreciate any help on my problem.

THanks a lot.

[InvariantLoop]

What brand are your Hard drives? Go to the manufacturers website, search for the Hard drives you have, and read the documentation and specification for the HD, you will find out what is their read/write speed. No one can guess what is without the actual model of the hard drive.

[vwrabbit81]

One is a fujitsu mpc3043at(4 Gb) which is said to internal data rate up to 19.8 mb/s and external data rate up to 16.7 mb/s or 33.3 mb/s(In DMA mode)

The next one is a maxtor diamondmax 36 90845u2(8 Gb) Ultra-DMA/66 5400RPM.

Don`t you think they have to work faster than 2 mb/s???
Any help,please!!!

[Salem]

1. Benchmark each drive separately.

2. Put them on different IDE channels.

3. What the drive is physically capable of, and what your OS with it's file system is capable of are different things.

[Waldo2k2]

always use 80 pin cables on hard drives, otherwise DMA is impossible. You can easily see the difference, 40 pin cables have 40 wires, 80 pin cables have 80 wires, so the 80 pin cables have much thinner wires and are packed more densely.

[vwrabbit81]

Thanks to all,i fixed it!!........looking around and trying anything,i discover in the bios,that i have to put APCI in Power management (or something like that),and the 2 drives are now working dma 33.
Do you know for what are this,APCI and APM which iare the 2 words in the power management in the bios??
Thanks for your last help!

[itsme86]

First of all, you have the acronym wrong. It's ACPI, not APCI. The very first google link on the simple search "acpi" points you to all sorts of information about it:
http://www.acpi.info/

Another simple search on "apm power" comes up with this link that has tons of information:
http://www.blueowltechnologies.com/pmtAPM.asp

[Jez]

always use 80 pin cables on hard drives, otherwise DMA is impossible. You can easily see the difference, 40 pin cables have 40 wires, 80 pin cables have 80 wires, so the 80 pin cables have much thinner wires and are packed more densely.

Not quite true. You mean UDMA-66 and higher is only possible with the 80 core cable. (not pins - they still have 40). UDMA-33 works fine with 40-core cable, in fact the bios will usually spot which cable you have and set the transfer rate to the HD accordingly.