K7S5A SIS 735 Perfomance problem

[Guest]

Hello,

I have two IDE drive and one SCSI on my K7S5A motherboard with a Athlon XP 1800 and 128mb SDRAM. After getting slow performance from my hard drives on the built in IDE controller I set out to determine the cause of my problems.

I ran three different benchtests on this system. All of these benchmarks show that the hard drives are causing my perfomance problmes as I am getting a sustained data transfer rate of around 6mb per second. I have two drives an Maxtor ATA 100 20 GB drive and an IBM 45GB 75GXP drive.
Both drive pass the manufacturers utility tests and are both showing as UDMA5 within the BIOS. I also have UDMA enabled within windows as well as having write cache enabled. I have both drives on their own cables one on the primary and one on the secondary by themselves set to 16 head master. I beleive that this may be a problem with my IDE controller. (as the drive perform great on my other system with a promise ATA 100 controller) I checked DM to find my driver provider and sure enough I have Microsoft as the driver provider. I have been unable to locate an SIS 735 IDE controller driver anywhere. If anybody knows the location of one please let me know or if you have any other suggestions I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank You,

 

[Xynok]

What happens if you let the BIOS Auto Detect the settings for the drives?

 

[Guest]

both drives are set to auto type and mode within the system BIOS. From the BIOS they are showing the correct mode and capacity. I have also used IBM feature tool to verify the IBM drive mode and when the drives autodetect on boot up they show UDMA5

 

[Guest]

I also use a k7s5a and have had low benchmarks for the hard drive. some things that i think helped me out were to turn off SMART drive monitoring to cut down on any overhead, and to take my boot drive onto its own ide channel (i think i had it hooked up with a slow zip drive as slave) if there is an optimized driver, it might not make any amazing difference anyway. good luck

k7s5a
duron 650@866 1.8v
2x256 crucial cas2.5 PC2100

 

[kief]

Your problem will go away once you install the correct driver for the board!! I dont have a link handy ATM though =(

Jesus saves, but Mario scores!!!

 

[Guest]

Thank you for your reply, I do have SMART enabled within the system BIOS which I will disable (thanks for the tip)
I have both drives on their own IDE channel. One set as the Master on the Primary and one set to the Secondary as master. These drives are by them selves on the their respective IDE cable as I have SCSI CD-ROM, Burner, and a additional SCSI drive. I am going to go home tonight and take another look at my system config and see what I can come up with. I will post with any results that I can come up with. Thank you everybody for all of your input

 

[Ncogneto]

If you are running 2k or xp you need to run SISIDE after the install, if 98SE or ME I beleive the file is DMA98. This will allow UMDA mode operation of the drives.

It's not what they tell you, its what they don't tell you!

 

[Guest]

I have not had any luck finding any updated IDE controller drivers for that particular chipset. After going home and blowing out the IDE controller driver to try to get into UDMA mode I was still showing PIO mode. I went ahead and installed my Promise ATA 66 controller card that I had lying around and now I am getting at least decent performance from the drives. They are back within the area where I would expect an ATA 100 drive. I guess I will just wait to see if an update comes out so I can use my onboard controller or I just may go get an ATA 100 controller and put the drives on that. If anyone finds anything else out on this please let me know. And thank you everyone for all of your suggestions

 

[kamiwut]

What kind of cables are you using?

 

[Ncogneto]

So what part of my message did you not understand?

It's not what they tell you, its what they don't tell you!