PATA cause one core go 100%

[anosh]

My Seagate 120GB PATA drive causes one of my CPU cores to go to 100% everytime I perform an action on it such as write, read etc..

I've checked and there is nothing wrong with the cable and it's the same hdd I've been using in my earlier computer without any such behaviour.

computer is Dell XPS 600
Nvidia nforce 4 16X SLI with 2x 7800GTX
1GB Samsung ram and 820D

Any ideas?

 

[Madwand]

Check that DMA mode is enabled in the device manager for that drive instead of PIO. PIO can exhibit high CPU utilization. Beyond that, I dunno.

 

[anosh]

you're correct!!

The "Primary IDE Channel" under "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" says that device 0 has PIO as current transfer mode.

in the options above is says "Transfer mode: DMA if available"
but it has choosen to use PIO.

How can I force DMA mode?

 

[anosh]

I restarted and went into BIOS.

The dvd-drive was "enabled" and you could see info about it while the hdd wasn't "enabled" and there was no info.

I enabled the drive, booted back to windows and it's in DMA mode.

Thank you very much for you help!!!