[Hudlug] SCSI drives vs EIDE for Crimbo

[Dave Pattern]

Hiya Shak

I've read bad things about rounded cables for fast ATA100/133 drives. 
 Proper flat ATA100/133 cables have a grounding wire between each 
"data" wire that helps keep electronic crosstalk and interferance to 
a minimum.

With the rounded cables, all the wires are getting bunched up 
together, so I'm not 100% convinced that the grounding wires can do 
their job properly.  I guess the more you spend on a rounded cable, 
the more care the manufacturer will have put in.

If you're having IDE problems, try re-attaching the IDE cables, then 
try different (or new) cables.  If you still get problems and your 
motherboard supports it, check the to see if the PSU drops any of the 
voltages when large transfers are taking place.  If so, you might 
need a more powerful (or better quality) PSU.

It's also worth checking to see if there are any BIOS/driver fixes 
available for the motherboard that fix known transfer problems.  One 
of my ABit motherboards suffered lock-ups when transferring large 
files and that was caused by the on-board Highpoint controller - a 
BIOS upgrade fixed that.

Finally, slows downs might be due to the DMA setting, or if the hard 
drive is sharing the same IDE cable with a slower device.  I know my 
SuSE linux has a DMA option that, after I'd activated it, made the 
hard drive fly :-)

DaveyP

On 16 Dec 2002 at 18:46, Shak wrote:

> Hiyas,
> 
> Im having IDE problems at the moment, I have endless 
bugs with my hard disks and CD-RW such as when Im using 
them heavily (such as copying data from one disk to the 
other) my system is liable to go very slowly. Do you 
reckon its worth trying some rounded cables?
> 
> Ta,
> Shak