Re: maxtor 92732U8 + g4/400mhz agp

[Kris Tilford]

I've recently been playing with a similar 30 GB Maxtor drive (53073U6).  
Your drive is an ATA66 / UDMA66 (mode 4) drive. Some of the old Maxtor  
drives had the newer circuit boards that could support ATA100 / UDMA100  
(mode 5) operation, and theoretically 50% more throughput IF you have a  
system that can support ATA100. You'd also need a PC to flash the  
drive, with the drive in a "master" position on a bus I believe. The  
program is a DOS program, so you'll need to boot in DOS, but it's just  
a single command, so it's not difficult.
I'm not too familiar with G4 AGP models, and I know that a lot of  
people bitched that their G4's had crappy ATA66 controllers which were  
a wasted bottleneck on a 100MHz System bus. If you have an ATA100 card,  
or your G4 controller supports ATA100 speed, you might want to take the  
time to check and see if your drive can be updated to get the quicker  
speed. Photos of the correct and incorrect circuit boards can be seen  
here:

http://www.plasma-online.de/index.html?content=http%3A//www.plasma- 
online.de/english/identify/serial/harddisk/hd_maxtor.html

The software to upgrade can be found here:

http://www.rettesoft.hu/ftpdir/DriversMK/Maxtor/Utilities/66to100/

It appears that the there was also a problem with some newer ATA100  
drives not being recognized correctly on older ATA33 PC's, so they  
released the same program with two different titles and instructions,  
even though they are the same. The "66to100.exe" appears to be  
identical to the "udmaupdt.exe" even though one has instructions to  
bump up a 66 to 100, while the other has instructions to bump down a  
100 to 33. Basically it's a manual over ride, but supposedly the ATA100  
should have auto-selected the 33 speed without intervention. I flashed  
mine to 100 on a 33 system, and after the flash, it wasn't recognized  
anymore, but is fine otherwise, and now an ATA100 drive.

Good luck, Kris Tilford

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