Promise IDE adapter bad for DVDRW?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Marcin Nowak
  • Start date Start date
M

Marcin Nowak

For some time I had a setup with 2 HDDs on one onboard IDE channel
and 2 DVDRW drives on the second. After experiencing difficulties
with concurrent use of the two DVD writers I wanted to try if giving
each writer a dedicated IDE channel would improve things.
I connected the second DVDRW to a Promise Ultra100 IDE adapter. The
result is a big failure: the drive can only write at 1x speed instead
of 8x, and eats 50%-100% CPU. I have tried both DVD writers (they are
different) and different cables.
Funny enough, the DVD reading is working fine, it's only writing that
hit some strange barrier.
Any ideas what is the problem here?

Setup:
Windows 2000 Pro SP4
asus A7N8X nForce2 rev1 mobo (newest drivers + nvidia IDE) driver pack 4.27
Promise Ultra100 bios 2.20.0.14 with 2.0.0.42 driver
reporting the DVD writer connected and using UDMA 2

Marcin
 
Marcin Nowak said:
For some time I had a setup with 2 HDDs on one onboard IDE channel
and 2 DVDRW drives on the second. After experiencing difficulties
with concurrent use of the two DVD writers I wanted to try if giving
each writer a dedicated IDE channel would improve things.
I connected the second DVDRW to a Promise Ultra100 IDE adapter. The
result is a big failure: the drive can only write at 1x speed instead
of 8x, and eats 50%-100% CPU. I have tried both DVD writers (they are
different) and different cables.
Funny enough, the DVD reading is working fine, it's only writing that
hit some strange barrier.
Any ideas what is the problem here?
Click to expand...

Why not put your hard drives on the Promise card and put the DVDRW
drives on the motherboard controllers?
 
Daniel Prince said:
Why not put your hard drives on the Promise card and put the DVDRW
drives on the motherboard controllers?
--
Click to expand...

I think I have tried that some time ago, and I believe it gave me
problems of some kind. Right now I can't really remember what exactly
the problems were, but most likely it was something to do with
booting. I have a multiboot to DOS, Win98 and 2k. I also have a SATA
disk, which could (?) possibly become C: if I move the others to
Promise.
Well, it might be doable, but before I start messing with that setup I
would first like to know the full story about Promise and DVD writers.

Marcin
 
Marcin Nowak said:
I think I have tried that some time ago, and I believe it gave me
problems of some kind. Right now I can't really remember what exactly
the problems were, but most likely it was something to do with
booting. I have a multiboot to DOS, Win98 and 2k. I also have a SATA
disk, which could (?) possibly become C: if I move the others to Promise.
Well, it might be doable, but before I start messing with that setup I
would first like to know the full story about Promise and DVD writers.
Click to expand...

Promise only very recently started to support ATAPI on their controllers.
You should probably give them a few years to catch up. *eg*
 
Folkert Rienstra said:
Promise only very recently started to support ATAPI on their controllers.
You should probably give them a few years to catch up. *eg*
Click to expand...

Oh, I see. This controller is not even very recent, it's the
original Ultra100. So maybe the ATAPI support was really poor than.
I actually assumed that there is no difference between HDD and DVD
IDE interface. I suspect that was naive. I am off to learn some more
on this subject.
Thanks,
Marcin
 
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