duel harddrive problem

[matchbox]

hi,

i have just added a new 250gb hard drive into my computer and i'm currenlty running it off the same cable as my 80gb hard drive. i have dumped my documents on to the 250gb drive and everything else is on the 80gb.

the problem that i'm having is when i go to play video's or music from the new harddrive, it becomes very stop startish... i have 512ram and a 3ghz cpu.which should be suffiencient enough, i have been playing music in the background whilst using word and it seems to struggle. i'm not sure why it's doing this but hopefully some one might have an idea why this might be happening.

thanks for your help in advance.

Aaron

 

[slicessoul]

Check the DMA settings.

 

[matchbox]

what should the DMA Settings be on?

 

[redwing]

Stop the duel man, stop the fightin' !!

Ok on a more serious side, if you have two IDE ports, you're better off running only 1 hard drive on each, and putting your DVD drives as slaves(or cable select). A HD needs much more bandwidth to properly operate, and whereas a HD with a CD drive on a single IDE port would be ok, two hard drives sharing the same port would create a bottleneck.

Ideally, each device should be connected to 1 channel. Most likely, if you're using IDE drives, you have 2 IDE channels on your mobo - in this case, this should be a quick fix.

Good luck

 

[slicessoul]

You can check the DMA settings in BIOS and in Device Manager IDE/ATAPI. Make sure the transfer settings is in "DMA if available".

Check your IDE cables. Is it 40 pin cable or 80 pin cable ?
Check the Master/Slave settings on each HDD. Make sure one is Master and the other is Slave.

You got 2 HDD connected in one IDE cable. If your 80GB HDD is an ATA 66 and your 250GB is an ATA 100, then your 250GB will run on ATA 66. So the transfer performance of the 250GB is not in its full speed.

As redwing said, ideally is just like he said. One IDE connected together in one cable with DVD or CD-ROM, but in this case, when you are accessing the CD-ROM or DVD, then you'll got a crappy performance on your HDD too.

 

[enforcer22]

all ide cables are 40 pin connections however for ata66 or higher a 40 pin connecter with a 80 wire conducter is needed for the max speed. Never heard of HD's downgrading them selves because there was a slower interface drive on the same chain but if thats true one more reason why im moving to scsi. Even if it does that ata 33 ata 66 are more then capable of supplying the stream needed for the video. Like was mentioned dont put two hard drives on the same chain if you can help it even though i have never got a problem from doing this IDE is vary limited when it comes to bandwidth the more you put on IDE the slower it gets especialy when you put high bandwidth devices on the same chain.