[Help] SATA Doubts

Well, since couple of weeks I'm having a small trouble with my SATA drives.

I have two 160 GB SATA drives (Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 SATA NCQ 160827). One is connected to SATA-0 and another one on SATA-1. Recently I noticed performance drop on the second drive.

Using Nero I checked Read-Speed on both drives... the first one produced average 45-49 MBPS reading speed while second drived was dropped at average 3-4 MBPS.

Using Nero Infotool I noticed DMA on my secondary IDE channel is disabled, while It's ON on primary IDE channel. In Device Manager of Windows XP, I could see the option "DMA if available" selected on both IDE channel but it shows curret transfer mode on Secondary Channel as "PIO only".

Now I'm not sure if this is the actual reason for performance drop, but so far this is what seems logical to me. If anyone can guide me to how do I enable DMA on my secondary channel forcefully (since I've tried all known options)??

AND.... do you think there could be any other reason for it?

(For note: I've Defragmented all my partitions, so the fragmentation is not an issue)

#307194

is it a R.A.I.D setup or the second one is a slave?

#307204

Both of them are Master... No, it's not RAID setup.

Well, another doubt I had was... is it possible to do RAID setup now?? What I mean is, I've already had my partitions and things set on drives, so I doubt if I can convert them to RAID?

#307213

yeah, if you have 2 IDE controllers and if both hard drives are the same size, same brand AND if your motherboard supports it... you're good to go

#307219

yeah, your performance would be impacted for the reasons you gave, try changing PIO to DMA through your BIOS. Good Luck

#307230

@firecracker6: I forgot to mention that, that I had tried changing it thru BIOS... but still in OS it showed me the damn PIO mode.

#307231