Please help! SATA HD boots up in UDMA5, drops to PIO

[jgiam]

Hi folks, appreciate any help you can give on this

My system specs is as follows:
Asus P4P800-X (865PE) mainboard
Intel P4 2.4C @ 2.88
Kingston DDR400 4x256MB
Seagate 7200.7 120GB PATA
Samsung SP1213C 120GB SATA

My BIOS is configured to PATA+SATA

The Seagate is the boot drive

When Windows boots up, going into the Device Manager, IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers, Primary IDE Channel (2nd one), it shows UDMA 5

I can run HDTach and it shows the normal 60MB/s read speeds

But, when I run a program that does lots of read/writes, e.g defrag or copying a file to the Samsung, everything slows down.

Device Manager then shows that it is PIO mode.

http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/6081/hdpiomode6wx.png

Running HDTach then shows read speed of 3MB/s

http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/2320/hdpiomode20wi.png

Event Viewer also had lots of EventID 51 (error detected during a paging operation), as well as some EventID 11 (driver detected a controller error)

I moved the paging file to the Seagate, so EventID 51 disappeared. EventID 11 still pops up once in a while.

I have tried all sorts of possible things from what I Googled. I changed my FSB to the default 200 (was 240x 12 = 2880), cos a site mentioned about O/c causing problems to the SATA connector. I installed the latest Intel Chipset Software installation utility. I uninstalled the Ultra ATA Storage Controllers, Primary and Secondary IDE Channel in Device Manager, then rebooted to let Windows reinstall everything. I ran Samsung's HD utility, even Maxtor's (cos it checks non-Maxtors as well), all OK. I changed the SATA cable to the one that came with my Asus mainboard.

What could be the %$*&#^$(*# problem!?

 

[Red_Frog]

More than likely you have a bad (or 40pin) drive cable which is creating errors. This is a fairly common problem, and you may read more about it here.



Edit:
Sorry, I misread your post. You said the trouble is with your SATA drive. Your controller or drive may be dying, I would suggest you try it in another PC if at all possible. You could also check to see if the drive is mounted too tightly. I once saw a drive that was basically 'smashed' vertically between other parts which kept it from running.