There is an issue with some UDMA-33 drives and early versions of bios' on
100MHz bus machines (principally socket 7 based - ie AMD and Celeron)
because of timing issues and the differences between the Fast-ATA spec and
the EIDE spec.

Turning ON UDMA with result in a fast but unstable system - so make sure you
have a little recovery time, do backups etc, before jumping in.

Max

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Peter Hyde
Sent: Tuesday, 15 June 1999 10:40
To: Multiple recipients of list offtopic
Subject: Re: [DUG-OFFTOPIC]: NT Speed


Ian wrote:

> in the end I wrote a simple program myself (attached).

Almost exactly parallels one I wrote myself for the same purpose
some months back <g>

For those who are not aware, if you have ATA (=Ultra-DMA-33)
capable controllers and drives, NT does NOT turn on ATA support
by default. However, an MS utility called DMACHECK.EXE will
do this, provided you have either SP4+, or a hotfix to SP3 called
ata-fixi.exe. SP3 itself won't support UDMA-33.  Hunt the MS site
for these terms/filenames and you'll come up with 'em

Anyway, DMACheck will tell you the current "detect UDMA33"
setting, and allow you to turn it ON if you want. There are dire
warnings about how it might not work if you don't have UDMA33-
capable hardware, but in all cases I've tried it, it behaved
(including a case where I *didn't* have the right kind of drive).

And the resulting disk speedup was 20% on average. My drives
are typically writing at 5-6MB/s these days, compared to 3-4
beforehand.

Oh, and defragging is *definitely* also a good thing, as Ian says.
Look for diskkeeper-lite (freeware) and use it.


cheers,
peter

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