Another A7A266 Question - ATA133 support?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ohaya
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Ohaya

Hi,

I just got a new ATA133 drive (Samsung 160GB), and in BIOS, the A7A266 is
showing "UDMA 5" for the drive. I have one of the IDE cables with the
"finer" wires.

I know that the A7A266 is suppose to only support ATA100, but according to:

http://groups.google.com/[email protected]

the poster got his A7A266 rev. 1.03 board with BIOS 1009 to recognize UDMA
6.

My board is rev. 1.04, and I have BIOS 1011.

Does anyone know if it's possible to get this A7A266 to support ATA133?

Is the ATA133 cable different from an ATA100 IDE cable?

Thanks,
Jim
 
Ohaya said:
Hi,

I just got a new ATA133 drive (Samsung 160GB), and in BIOS, the A7A266 is
showing "UDMA 5" for the drive. I have one of the IDE cables with the
"finer" wires.

I know that the A7A266 is suppose to only support ATA100, but according to:
http://groups.google.com/[email protected]

the poster got his A7A266 rev. 1.03 board with BIOS 1009 to recognize UDMA
6.

My board is rev. 1.04, and I have BIOS 1011.

Does anyone know if it's possible to get this A7A266 to support ATA133?

Is the ATA133 cable different from an ATA100 IDE cable?

Thanks,
Jim
Click to expand...

Hi,

I forgot to mention, I have the new ATA133 drive on the same IDE cable as my
old ATA100 drive:

Old ATA100 drive: Master
New ATA133 drive: Slave

This is only temporary while I'm imaging from the old drive to the new
drive, and eventually, will only have the new drive as Master.

Would this make a difference and prevent BIOS from recognizing the new drive
as ATA133/UDMA6?
 
I think that I just figured this out. The drive appears to have been set
for ATA100! I found a utility called "Hutil" on Samsung's website, and it
allowed me to display and change the setting, and the drive now displays as
UDMA 6 during bootup.

I'm going to do some testing with HDTach, but does anyone know what some
typical HDTach numbers would look like for Burst rate and CPU utilization
for an ATA133 drive?

Thanks,
Jim
Click to expand...
The A7A does not support ATA133....check here:
http://usa.asus.com/prog/spec.asp?m=A7A266&langs=09
The fastest ATA burst speed the board can run at is ATA100.
 
BigBadger said:
The A7A does not support ATA133....check here:
http://usa.asus.com/prog/spec.asp?m=A7A266&langs=09
The fastest ATA burst speed the board can run at is ATA100.
Click to expand...

Hi,

Yes, I know it says that, but as I pointed out, some people have reported
that they dod get it to support ATA133. Even without ATA133 support, I am
seeing results in HDTach with CPU Utilization in the 40%-50% range, so it
seems like something wrong with my configuration.

Any ideas?

Device Manager says "Ultra DMA" on the IDE device.

Jim
 
Ohaya said:
and

Hi,

Yes, I know it says that, but as I pointed out, some people have reported
that they dod get it to support ATA133. Even without ATA133 support, I am
seeing results in HDTach with CPU Utilization in the 40%-50% range, so it
seems like something wrong with my configuration.

Any ideas?

Device Manager says "Ultra DMA" on the IDE device.

Jim
Click to expand...

Hi,

Finally, I think that I've made some progress. What I did was image the C:
partition on the new drive so that I could restore it later, then I did a
clean installation of Win2K Pro from CD.

After the installtion, I installed HDTach and ran it.

I am now getting:

Burst Read: 80MB/s+
CPU Utilization: 14.4%

So it seems like this motherboard is definitely able to do a bit better, but
something in the original installation is mucking things up. The current
(new) Win2K installation says "ALI ...IDE Controller", as the original
installation did, so I don't get it.

My problem now is that I have a ton of stuff on the original Win2K
installation, some of which will be difficult for me to reproduce, so I'd
still like to find some way of getting the original installation to work
properly.

I'm going to check which driver file is being used in the new installation
(I think that it's ALI...vxd or something like that) and compare to the old
installation, but other than that, does anyone out there have any
suggestions?

Thanks,
Jim
 
Ohaya,

As you have found, the A7A266 does indeed support ATA133 (Mode 6) in Bios,
despite some earlier postings to the contrary. However, to get it to run in
Windows, you need to install the "Integrated 205" IDE drivers available at
http://www.ali.com.tw/eng/support/drivers.php. Your chipset will be the
M1647.

Once installed, you can check if the OS recognises Mode 6 by going in to
Control Panel - Device Manager - IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers - Primary IDE
channel - Properties (This is for Win XP, don't know about win2k). You can
have mode 6 and mode 5 drives on the same cable okay.

Regards,

Keithm
 
Looks like you are right about the ATA133 support....maybe someone should
tell Asus!!!
 
I think the problem is that the spec sheets are put out when the board is
first released and do not show changes unless the model number is changed
and then they put out a sheet for that model. The A7A266 is like yesterday's
newspaper to ASUS.
Billh
 
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