Hello,

I purchased a Maxtor  85050D6 udma drive in December.  I had it as
master on the Pri IDE channel with a Quantum Bigfoot 2.5 GB (not udma).
I had heard that having another drive on the same channel that was not
udma could slow down the transfer rate, so I just bought another Maxtor
drive - 91576D4.  My motherboard is an Abit PD5N with a Sis 5598 chipset
and the latest bios update.  My problem is that the bios only seems to
pick up the master drive as udma mode 2.  Both drives are identified by
name, but the slave is set to PIO mode 4.  I tried swapping them,
connecting each one as master with the other as slave, but whichever one
I had set as master gets set as dma mode 2, and whichever one is set as
slave is set at PIO mode 4.  Wintune97 confirms this with the transfer
rate on the slave drive showing up around 12mb/s(cached), with the
master at 30-32mb/s (cached).  The uncached transfer rate on the master
is great - around 9mb/s instead of the 5mb/s it was when I had the
Quantum drive on the same channel.  The slave drive uncached transfer
rate is 6mb/s.  Is there was a natural limitation in the drives so that
only the master could be dma mode 2?  I am thinking about putting these
drives as Pri and Sec masters with my CDROM and LS-120 drives as slaves
on the Sec and Pri ide channels respectively.  If the transfer rate is
only affected when the slower component is active, then it wouldn't be
much of a problem.  My goal is to get both drives working the the much
faster dma mode 2.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

bob starkey
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