[gareth magennis]

Hi,

I'm trying to put a larger drive in my laptop for recording. My current
Hitatchi travelstar 40GB runs great, but 2 different new 160GB drives seem
to be 10 times slower than they should, another Travelstar, and a Western
Digital. (I am using Roadkill Hard Drive Speed Test)

Both new drives were formatted and XP installed, along with all current
updates/service packs. Nothing else. They both test similar, at max transfer
rates of around 2.7MB/sec, compared with the old 40G drive's 32MB/sec. The
tests overall speed score is 22 vs 244.

When I try and transfer a 4GB Wav from USB CF card, the old 40G drive does
it in 5 minutes, the 160G drives up to an hour, with the time remaining
changing wildly during transfer. Something not right at all.

Laptop Sony Vaio Pentium 4, drives are old type PATA, not SATA. BIOS
reports a 40G / 160G drive, no other drive data displayed.


Any help appreciated, I've run out of ideas now. Maybe the Sony won't take
a larger drive properly? Weird.


Cheers,


Gareth.

[John Williamson]

Gareth Magennis wrote:
Hi,

I'm trying to put a larger drive in my laptop for recording. My current
Hitatchi travelstar 40GB runs great, but 2 different new 160GB drives seem
to be 10 times slower than they should, another Travelstar, and a Western
Digital. (I am using Roadkill Hard Drive Speed Test)

Both new drives were formatted and XP installed, along with all current
updates/service packs. Nothing else. They both test similar, at max transfer
rates of around 2.7MB/sec, compared with the old 40G drive's 32MB/sec. The
tests overall speed score is 22 vs 244.

When I try and transfer a 4GB Wav from USB CF card, the old 40G drive does
it in 5 minutes, the 160G drives up to an hour, with the time remaining
changing wildly during transfer. Something not right at all.

Laptop Sony Vaio Pentium 4, drives are old type PATA, not SATA. BIOS
reports a 40G / 160G drive, no other drive data displayed.


Any help appreciated, I've run out of ideas now. Maybe the Sony won't take
a larger drive properly? Weird.


It could be the size of the drive confusing the BIOS. The hardware based
HD addressing scheme changes at about 128Gb, and some older BIOS chips
can't handle the new scheme. If you can get a 120Gb drive, that may work
better.

Another thing to check is what mode the drive's running in. Your
computer may be running it under PIO, which is guaranteed to work, but
is s-l-o-w, as against the various DMA modes, which are a lot faster.
The setting can often be changed in the BIOS settings, which you get to
during boot by pressing (probably, on a Sony) the F2 or F3 key as you
turn it on. It may, unfortunately, stop the computer recognising the
drive altogether if you do this, but if you turn the system off and then
restart, pressing the BIOS access key, then select the default settings,
it will work again.

Hope this helps.

--
Tciao for Now!

John.

[Laurence Payne[_2_]]

On Sat, 7 Feb 2009 14:34:33 -0000, "Gareth Magennis"
wrote:

Laptop Sony Vaio Pentium 4, drives are old type PATA, not SATA. BIOS
reports a 40G / 160G drive, no other drive data displayed.


Any help appreciated, I've run out of ideas now. Maybe the Sony won't take
a larger drive properly? Weird.

What model precisely? Maybe it's limited. Maybe there's a BIOS
update enabling larger drives. Maybe BIOS is confused and you have to
manually re-scan for drives. There are BIOS updates at
http://support.vaio.sony.co.uk/downl...voe_en_GB_cons

but I can't search for your model, as I don't know what it is!

[gareth magennis]

"Soundhaspriority" wrote in message
...

"Gareth Magennis" wrote in message
...
Hi,

I'm trying to put a larger drive in my laptop for recording. My current
Hitatchi travelstar 40GB runs great, but 2 different new 160GB drives
seem to be 10 times slower than they should, another Travelstar, and a
Western Digital. (I am using Roadkill Hard Drive Speed Test)

Both new drives were formatted and XP installed, along with all current
updates/service packs. Nothing else. They both test similar, at max
transfer rates of around 2.7MB/sec, compared with the old 40G drive's
32MB/sec. The tests overall speed score is 22 vs 244.

When I try and transfer a 4GB Wav from USB CF card, the old 40G drive
does it in 5 minutes, the 160G drives up to an hour, with the time
remaining changing wildly during transfer. Something not right at all.

Laptop Sony Vaio Pentium 4, drives are old type PATA, not SATA. BIOS
reports a 40G / 160G drive, no other drive data displayed.


Any help appreciated, I've run out of ideas now. Maybe the Sony won't
take a larger drive properly? Weird.

What is the laptop chipset? There is a bug in one old chipset I've seen in
an HP Pentium laptop. If the drive is larger than 137gb, the driver won't
run the drive as a DMA device, reverting to PIO. And there is actually an
obscure driver someone at UCLA reverse engineered years ago to fix it.

I can't remember the name of the chipset, but if you give me a name, I'll
recognize it.

Bob Morein
(310) 237-6511


Er, how do I find out which chipset? In System Devices there are ALi PCI to
ISA bridge things mentioned? ATI video adaptor, Realtek sound chip, it has
Phoenix BIOS.



Thanks,

Gareth.

Model is Sony Vaio PCG K215S Pentium 4 2.8GHz.

[gareth magennis]

"Laurence Payne" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 7 Feb 2009 14:34:33 -0000, "Gareth Magennis"
wrote:

Laptop Sony Vaio Pentium 4, drives are old type PATA, not SATA. BIOS
reports a 40G / 160G drive, no other drive data displayed.


Any help appreciated, I've run out of ideas now. Maybe the Sony won't
take
a larger drive properly? Weird.

What model precisely? Maybe it's limited. Maybe there's a BIOS
update enabling larger drives. Maybe BIOS is confused and you have to
manually re-scan for drives. There are BIOS updates at
http://support.vaio.sony.co.uk/downl...voe_en_GB_cons

but I can't search for your model, as I don't know what it is!



Hi, that link is where I got the drivers from, but I can't find any mention
of a BIOS update.

BIOS is Phoenix, and there is no facility for altering anything to do with
hard drives as far as I can see.


Model is PCG K215S.




Thanks,


Gareth.

[gareth magennis]

"Soundhaspriority" wrote in message
...

"Gareth Magennis" wrote in message
...

"Soundhaspriority" wrote in message
...

"Gareth Magennis" wrote in message
...
Hi,

I'm trying to put a larger drive in my laptop for recording. My
current Hitatchi travelstar 40GB runs great, but 2 different new 160GB
drives seem to be 10 times slower than they should, another Travelstar,
and a Western Digital. (I am using Roadkill Hard Drive Speed Test)

Both new drives were formatted and XP installed, along with all current
updates/service packs. Nothing else. They both test similar, at max
transfer rates of around 2.7MB/sec, compared with the old 40G drive's
32MB/sec. The tests overall speed score is 22 vs 244.

When I try and transfer a 4GB Wav from USB CF card, the old 40G drive
does it in 5 minutes, the 160G drives up to an hour, with the time
remaining changing wildly during transfer. Something not right at all.

Laptop Sony Vaio Pentium 4, drives are old type PATA, not SATA. BIOS
reports a 40G / 160G drive, no other drive data displayed.


Any help appreciated, I've run out of ideas now. Maybe the Sony won't
take a larger drive properly? Weird.

What is the laptop chipset? There is a bug in one old chipset I've seen
in an HP Pentium laptop. If the drive is larger than 137gb, the driver
won't run the drive as a DMA device, reverting to PIO. And there is
actually an obscure driver someone at UCLA reverse engineered years ago
to fix it.

I can't remember the name of the chipset, but if you give me a name,
I'll recognize it.

Bob Morein
(310) 237-6511


Er, how do I find out which chipset? In System Devices there are ALi PCI
to ISA bridge things mentioned? ATI video adaptor, Realtek sound chip,
it has Phoenix BIOS.



Thanks,

Gareth.

Model is Sony Vaio PCG K215S Pentium 4 2.8GHz.
Alright, you've got at least part of the ALI chipset. See
http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~leeey/a7a266/
See if you have the ALI 1535. Unfortunately, my experience was with the
1529, for which the link seems to have vanished.

You probably need this:
http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~leeey/a7a266/IDE4008.exe

Read the page carefully,

"UPDATE!!!
6. IDE4008.exe - ALi's UltraIDE driver, version 4.0.0.8. The Integrated
Driver above (1.091) has UltraIDE driver 4.0.0.7. Directly from the
README.TXT for this file:
This file contains a variety of information you should read before
installing ALi Ultra IDE driver. ALi Ultra IDE driver is a driver for NT5
Architecture (e.g., Windows 2000 and XP). It supports hard drive which has
size larger than 128GB (1G=2 ^ 30). It also supports ATA133 hard drive for
better disk performance (ALi M1535+, 1535D+ chips support ATA133 feature).
In other words... large drives NEED to use ALi's UltraIDE driver, and NOT
the mini-IDE driver that is found in other versions of ALi's Integrated
driver."

Bob Morein
(310) 237-6511




Blimey, looks like I need to be careful.

I have the ALi M5229. I'll try Googling on that.


Thanks very much, Bob.

[gareth magennis]

Just realised file number 5 on that link is the one I want.


Cheers.

[gareth magennis]

"Gareth Magennis" wrote in message
...
Hi,

I'm trying to put a larger drive in my laptop for recording. My current
Hitatchi travelstar 40GB runs great, but 2 different new 160GB drives seem
to be 10 times slower than they should, another Travelstar, and a Western
Digital. (I am using Roadkill Hard Drive Speed Test)

Both new drives were formatted and XP installed, along with all current
updates/service packs. Nothing else. They both test similar, at max
transfer rates of around 2.7MB/sec, compared with the old 40G drive's
32MB/sec. The tests overall speed score is 22 vs 244.

When I try and transfer a 4GB Wav from USB CF card, the old 40G drive does
it in 5 minutes, the 160G drives up to an hour, with the time remaining
changing wildly during transfer. Something not right at all.

Laptop Sony Vaio Pentium 4, drives are old type PATA, not SATA. BIOS
reports a 40G / 160G drive, no other drive data displayed.


Any help appreciated, I've run out of ideas now. Maybe the Sony won't
take a larger drive properly? Weird.


Cheers,


Gareth.



Hurrah, the new drive is now sorted, thanks to Bob Morein, who had the
solution. The laptop does think it has a SCSI/Raid controller and SCSI
drive, as was described in Bob's link, but it works fine and I don't care.


Thanks Bob.



Gareth.

[Richard Crowley]

"Gareth Magennis" wrote...
Hurrah, the new drive is now sorted, thanks to Bob Morein, who had the
solution. The laptop does think it has a SCSI/Raid controller and SCSI
drive, as was described in Bob's link, but it works fine and I don't care.
Thanks Bob.

"I love it when a plan comes together!"
Col. John "Hannibal" Smith - The A-Team
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084967/quotes

[jtougas[_3_]]

On Sat, 7 Feb 2009 14:34:33 -0000, "Gareth Magennis"
trained 100 monkeys to jump on the
keyboard and write:

Hi,

I'm trying to put a larger drive in my laptop for recording. My current
Hitatchi travelstar 40GB runs great, but 2 different new 160GB drives seem
to be 10 times slower than they should, another Travelstar, and a Western
Digital. (I am using Roadkill Hard Drive Speed Test)

Both new drives were formatted and XP installed, along with all current
updates/service packs. Nothing else. They both test similar, at max transfer
rates of around 2.7MB/sec, compared with the old 40G drive's 32MB/sec. The
tests overall speed score is 22 vs 244.

Another thing to keep an eye on in future purchases is the max rpm of
the HD - some laptops ship with as slow an HD as 4200rpm ( like my own
Toshiba). For a brief time, ATA-6 (laptop PATA drives) came in
7200rpm speeds, but 5400 rpm is about all I can find nowadays.

SATA drives, (un)fortunately, still come in 7200 rpm.


--
jtougas

"listen- there's a hell of a good universe next door
let's go" - e.e. cummings

[Richard Crowley]

"jtougas" wrote ...
Another thing to keep an eye on in future purchases is the max rpm of
the HD - some laptops ship with as slow an HD as 4200rpm ( like my own
Toshiba). For a brief time, ATA-6 (laptop PATA drives) came in
7200rpm speeds, but 5400 rpm is about all I can find nowadays.

SATA drives, (un)fortunately, still come in 7200 rpm.

Note that as hard drives get larger (in capacity), the more MB
passes under the head for each revolution. That is how they make
bigger and bigger hard drives, by increasing the density on the
platter, not by adding platters, cylinders, or heads.

This reduces the role of the spindle RPM in the actual data transfer
rate (read or write). And lower spindle RPM means less power to
keep it turning, which is an important factor when running on batteries.
So higher-density drives can achieve the same data rates with lower
spindle RPMs (and lower power).