NCCH-DL: 2nd SATA port runs at DMA mode 2 instead of mode 5

Hi,

I've Googled the group to find answers but cannot locate a post that
resembles my problem. I may be using the wrong keywords though.

My setup:

I have an NCCH-DL Xeon board that uses the 875 chipset together with a
6300ESB Southbridge (roughly comparable to ICH5R I believe). This
board has 2 PATA channels and 2 SATA channels from the Southbridge.
I'm running two Samsung HD080 Sata II drives on the SATA ports, and a
Plextor 716 DVD burner on the primary PATA. The secondary PATA is not
used.

My problem:

- Both drives get DMA mode 6 in the BIOS setup screen.
- The Plextor gets DMA mode 4 in the BIOS screen.

After booting Windows however, the drive on SATA_0 runs DMA mode 5
(which I more or less expected); the drive on SATA_1 only runs DMA
mode 2 (what the ?!?); the Plextor drive still gets DMA mode 4. The OS
is WinXP Pro SP2 and is using the Intel chipset drivers. As you can
imagine, DMA mode 2 is a bit too slow for my taste. In this day and
age the drives can outperform that mode with cache bursts etc.

Can anyone shed any light on this?

Grtz,
Friso

In article , "Newz"
wrote:

Hi,

I've Googled the group to find answers but cannot locate a post that
resembles my problem. I may be using the wrong keywords though.

My setup:

I have an NCCH-DL Xeon board that uses the 875 chipset together with a
6300ESB Southbridge (roughly comparable to ICH5R I believe). This
board has 2 PATA channels and 2 SATA channels from the Southbridge.
I'm running two Samsung HD080 Sata II drives on the SATA ports, and a
Plextor 716 DVD burner on the primary PATA. The secondary PATA is not
used.

My problem:

- Both drives get DMA mode 6 in the BIOS setup screen.
- The Plextor gets DMA mode 4 in the BIOS screen.

After booting Windows however, the drive on SATA_0 runs DMA mode 5
(which I more or less expected); the drive on SATA_1 only runs DMA
mode 2 (what the ?!?); the Plextor drive still gets DMA mode 4. The OS
is WinXP Pro SP2 and is using the Intel chipset drivers. As you can
imagine, DMA mode 2 is a bit too slow for my taste. In this day and
age the drives can outperform that mode with cache bursts etc.

Can anyone shed any light on this?

Grtz,
Friso

Have you tried "On-chip Serial ATA" [Enhanced] ? At least
on the ICH5 based boards, there are issues caused with the
setting used in the BIOS. On those boards, Enhanced and
SATA are the settings of choice. The Enhanced setting allows
six drives on the Southbridge, and should use native (PCI)
drivers for each. If the "bad" drive does not change, try removing
it from Device Manager and let Windows re-enumerate it.

Paul