Asus A7A266-E and Large Hard Disk Drives

(Applying the Googlejuice Principle again)

As I related last week, I recently experienced some technical difficulties with our main PC, so here's how it got sorted.

To summarise, the hard drive was getting a bit full. I was getting fed up with having to decide which game to uninstall to make room for a new one and/or more MP3s. So, I decided to benefit from the ongoing increase in the capacity/price ratio in new hard drives. I went and bought a 250GB beastie, and plugged it in. All seemed fine, initially.

After a while, it started to penetrate my mind that, while the drive was indeed nice and big, it was also slow, with a capital S-L-O-W. No, slower than that. A little research and application of a benchmarking tool revealed I was getting transfer rates of about 2MB/Second. Which is about a factor of 20 slower than the 3-year-old 60GB drive in the next bay over, and not at all what I would expect from a new HDD. Oh, and it's chewing 30%+ of the CPU while it's accessing.

That's Not Good.

Some digging in windows' multitudinous configuration thingies revealed that the new HDD was using the lowest-common-denominator and CPU-guzzling PIO mode.

From my reading of all the labels on things, it should have been using the much faster ATA UDMA mode 6, where the motherboard's ATA controller does all the hard work, just so the CPU doesn't have to.

Long story short¹, it appears that the motherboard in this PC, an Asus A7A266-E (or, more accurately, the ALiMagik 1 ATA controller on the motherboard) has some serious philosophical problems with the entire concept of hard disk drives larger than 137GB.

Some poking around google turned up this page assembled by some unfortunate soul in a similar position. That points to some "improved" drivers for the offending controller. So I gave them a whirl. They went in without too much fuss. New HDD now shows ~60MB/sec transfer rates, 30 times faster than before, and about 1.5 times faster than the other (older) HDD. Sorted!

Then I tried to play a game.

"Wrong DVD in drive". Huh? I check - no, that is the correct disk. Attempt to execute direct from the DVD. "This is not a valid windows executable" Hmm. Worked yesterday. Check disk surface - looks good. Try a different disk in the drive. Nope, it's the drive.

More googling. Those "improved" drivers seem to have a philosophical problem with CD/DVD drives. [swearword]. They also appear to be brutal hackery of the first order, which revert to PIO mode for those parts of the big drive above 137GB. (Sorry, I can't find the relevant pages for those snippets of information)

So, back to the old drivers. At this point, I did something monumentally stupid and horked the windows installation to the point where safe mode is sulking too (see last week's entry). Though I'm still not totally sure whether it was me, or whether the "improved" driver had been a bad little beastie and overwritten something it shouldn't have during install, which then caused grief when I attempted to revert to the old driver.

Having recombobulated everything, I was back to square one - slow hard drive. Having wasted half a day at this point, I'm afraid I wimped out and just went and bought a separate PCI ATA interface card. That installed easily, and seems to work fine with the big drive, so I now have two fast hard drives and fully-operational optical drives as well. Fancy!

[insert bitter and twisted comment here about hardware manufacturers (fx: glares at ALi) who abandon products without even leaving info around saying "This chipset has major problems with big hard drives, which we can't fix, sorry." I can't find anything on their site that admits they ever even manufactured the offending components. I'm not terribly happy with the motherboard people, either - This machine came with a 60GB HDD, which wasn't particularly big at the time; the motherboard wasn't cutting edge, but it wasn't a relic either. 140GB hard drives were certainly more than a theoretical possibility, didn't they think to test their board with one? If they had, this problem would probably have smacked them in the face.]

¹"Too late!" cry the audience.