A few things to consider.
1) I avoid Epox do to major quality control problems that they have had in not
too distant past.
2) Make sure that you are using an 80 conductor cable.
3) For high end Athlon systems make sure that you have a 300W power supply.
It is also a good idea to try to get your hands on a good quality power
supply. Swapping out a cheep power supply for a good one in the past has
helped me to go from UDMA mode 1 to 2 on one drive and PIO mode 4 to UDMA mode
2 on another.
4) You can monitor / tune your hard drive settings using hdparm. Before
reading further I strongly recommend reading the man page. There are ways to
try to force higher x-fer rates, but I don't recommend trying anything more
sophisticated than hdparm -m16 -c1 -d1 /dev/hda for your until you are really
familiar with what you are doing.
5) You can add a parameter like " hda=autotune hdc=autotune" to the kernel
parameters in your boot loader if they don't already exist. This will tell
the kernel to try to use optimum settings for your hard drive. I strongly
recommend adding an extra boot option to your boot loader when you try this
out in case something goes wrong. With some boot loaders this is easily done
at the boot prompt if you want to mess around with your hard drive without
messing around with your boot loader.
Stephen Poynter wrote:
> Hey everyone,
>
> I'm having a little problem getting mandrake 8 with the stock kernel to
> use my hardrive in udma 66 mode. In the dmesg log it looks as though my
> udma controller is recognized properly, but when the hard drives are
> detected it shows them as using only UDMA 33. I have an Epox-7KXA with
> the KX133 VIA chipset and a Maxtor 20GB ATA66 hard drive. Any
> suggestions on enabling UDMA 66????
>
> demesg output:
> ----------------
> ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
> VP_IDE: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 39
> VP_IDE: chipset revision 16
> VP_IDE: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
> ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
> VP_IDE: VIA vt82c686a (rev 21) IDE UDMA66 controller on pci00:07.1
> ide0: BM-DMA at 0xd000-0xd007, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:pio
> ide1: BM-DMA at 0xd008-0xd00f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:DMA
> hda: Maxtor 52049U4, ATA DISK drive
> hdc: WDC AC33200L, ATA DISK drive
> hdd: ASUS CD-S500/A, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
> ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
> ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
> hda: 40020624 sectors (20491 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=2491/255/63, UDMA(33)
> hdc: 6346368 sectors (3249 MB) w/256KiB Cache, CHS=6296/16/63, UDMA(33)
