DMA Multimots 2 VS UDMA under Windows 7 ?, bad disk performance ...

Hi,
first, sorry , I don't speak german...
I just find in a recycle bin (!) an Epox 8K3A (gooood !). I added it an Athlon XP-M 2800+ on it and it works quite well under Windows 7 32bits (currently 133*16 with a pin mod).
Except I have some issue, on disk performance for example.

My 2 IDE 80Go disks are limited to 16,5MB/S (instead of ~55 MB/s) under HDTach or HDtune.
I found on the Disk panel that the settings for DMA is "DMA Multimots 2".
Is it the maximum UDMA settings ??? (so UDMA133)
Or maybe I have to force something on the bios ?

Thank you very much !

Hi,
DMA multimots 2 are sure max. 16.67MB/sec (Look here under DMA...), in Windows Devicemanager the IDE-Channel is set to "DMA when possible" and the harddisk has to run at DMA5 (DMA is written short for Ultra DMA). Maybe your harddisk works on PIO4 Mode?? Please check this in the devicemanager >> ide-channels >> settings.

Gruß Babba

thanks for your answer, I'm going to check it next time I have the board (I don't have it currently).
In fact, I transfered all the stuff except the motherboard from an older KT7A SDRAM to this Epox 8k3a. On the KT7A, everything worked perfectly (UDMA and so on). But sdram is too slow, so I decided to change for the Epox (DDR1).

Under windows 7 hardware manager, disks are marked "DMA Multimots 2" which you're right is limited to ~16mo/s.
I'm going to check under the bios what are the settings for the disks.

Keep on touch

I only have the card one week end every 3 weeks, so it's hard to check but I did it !
I began flashing the firmware of the motherboard (with different version, 3909, 4909, or 4909 modded). It didn't change anything on the result (except I think I killed my graphic card, I don't know why but it doesn't seem to work any more since the flash of the mb under Windows with winflash, maybe bad interaction ...). I tried different settings on the mb bios, changing the cable, the IDE port.
I notice that my dvd burner is in UDMA 4, but with the hard disks, it desn't work. I just noticed one time that 1 disk (of 2) started to work at UDMA 5 but at the next start, it returned back to multimots 2.
So I wonder if this is not a "safe mode" : the motherboard detects there's an issue with the IDE port (channel problem) and put the transfer in multimot2 mode, limited to 16MB/S (so DMA but basic DMA).
I'm going to try to repair my graphic card, and plug the hard disks on an internal PCI IDE card, just to know. Because until now, except the IDE hard disk issue, it works quite well under Windows 7 x86 :
processor : 3.5
memory : 4.1
main hard disk (on PCI sata card) : 5.9
Not bad at all for a card found in a recycle bin !

Keep in touch