[RichardCRT]

This is my first post and I must congratulate everyone involved in making this such a user-friendly and useful site. I'm not a techie - I just know enough to be dangerous!
My system is set up specifically for video editing (it's now about 2 & a half yrs old). It consists of:
Gigabyte 7DXR
Athlon 1600+
512 Mb RAM
Windows 2000 Prof
3 internal hard-drives:
C: 40 Gb 5600 rpm (Quantum Fireball) with the OS and apps on
E: 60 Gb 7200 rpm (Seagate)
F: 200Gb 7200 rpm (Maxtor)
For the video I'm running Premiere 6.5 with a Canopus DVStorm card which has a feature called Stormtest to measure the read and write speeds of the drives to make sure they are fast enough for video. Previously all drives have worked fine but I've recently been away for 6 weeks. When I returned and switched on there was an error message on the start-up screen. (I can't for the life of me remember what it said). With a click-click here and a tap-tap there everything seemed to be fine. I decided to have a disc clear-up and deleted about 30 Gb of video files, mostly from F drive. I also have an external 250 Gb Maxtor which I use to back-up the whole set-up using Dantz Retrospect. I decided to clear this disc and do a nice clean new back-up. Only problem was that writing and comparing from F drive seemed to take forever. Once it was finally done I did the Stormtest and found C & E were fine at read and write speeds of betw 11 and 15 Mb/sec, but F was down around 2Mb/sec. I tried running some video from the drive but only got stutter and dropped frames. With deleting such a large chunk of files I thought a disc defrag might help - it didn't. Heeeeeelp! Any suggestions anyone? Cheers, Richard.

[Jedi_Master]

Howdy RichardCRT...

Could be a few things...

1) The ribbon cable is bad, replace it ( it should be a 80 wire UDMA cable )...

2) The drive is bad, test it with ( prefferably with a new ribbon cable ), this utility...

3) The drive isn't using UDMA, to check go into Device manager - double click on the IDE/Atapi controllers - double click on the primary or secondary controller ( which ever ont the hard drive is connected to ) - click on the Advanced settings tab - and check to see what the drive is running on, if I'm not misstaken the drive should be UDMA Mode 5 or 6...

[RichardCRT]

Many thanks Jedi Master. I think you may be on to something. I did as you said in 3) and for that drive (running as a secondary slave) the transfer Mode is set to 'DMA if available' but 'Current Transfer Mode' shows as 'PIO Mode'. Does that mean I need to have a tinker with the BIOS? If so, can you please give me an idea what to do. Thanks again. Cheers, Richard.

[Jedi_Master]

Well...

It could be a setting in the BIOS, a bad cable, or drive causing it to be in PIO mode...

I don't know exactally where in your BIOS, but under one of the menus, there may be a setting ( some BIOS' have it some don't ), for a UDMA setting for the Master and Slave on each channel ( I'm thinking maybe in the Advanced settings ), try setting it to Auto...

Also in the Standard Settings menu in the BIOS look under the Type and Mode settings for that drive and make sure it is set to Auto ( if it wasn't write down the previous settings, just to make sure that if something goes wrong you can set it back )...

To test the drive download, the PowerMax utility in the link in my previous post...

If this just started though, it may be a bad drive or cable...

[RichardCRT]

Problem solved!! - thanks to you putting me on the right track Jedi Master. I did a quick search on the net of PIO Mode/slow drives and there was a suggestion to uninstall the relevant IDE channel driver and reboot. Windows automatically reinstalls it and with another reboot the PIO Mode has been replaced by DMA. A quick run of Stormtest confirmed that the drive is now reading/writing as it should. Thanks again for pointing me in the right direction. Those humble 2 pennies are worth way more than that! Cheers, Richard.

[Jedi_Master]

Good that you got it fixed...

[Rollin' Rog]

Not even knowing what PIO mode was all about I googled it and came up with this, was it the article you mentioned? The "workaround" appears to be exactly what you did to resolve the problem.


http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;817472

[RichardCRT]

Hi Rollin'Rog. No that wasn't the article I found, but I was interested to see it. I originally searched on ask.com and have tried to re-find the information again, but no luck. I must get into the habit of book-marking! Thanks for your interest. Cheers, Richard.