Slow transfer speeds between ATA + SATA hard disks

[muftiman]

Ok, so heres the deal. Recently bought a brand new pc, used the ATA 250gb Hdd as a master and a 40gb ATA as a backup. A couple of weeks back i bought a SATA 250GB HDD which i made the master (boot drive containging windows) and made the other two backups.

Couple of things to point out :
1. when i was installing the hard disks the first time round, i pushed the ATA cable of the 250gb HDD the wrong way, thus pushing one of the pins. I later saw this, "de-staticed" myself + my tweezers and pulled the pin back out. the pin isnt wobbly and seems to be held in place nicely.
2. I have had the ATA 250gb for a mere four months, so the warranty is still good.
3. transfer speeds between the 250gb ATA and SATA are extremely slow and work out to be around 14mb/s.
4. Im unsure wether the MOBO supports SATAII or simple SATA (Hard disk is SATA II)

Current system specs :

1 x Antec Sonata II Piano Black Quiet Midi Tower - With 450W SmartPower2.0 PSU
1 x ASUS A8N-SLI Premium skt939 nForce4 Gigabit Ethernet Firewire 8channel audio
1 x AMD (Venice) Athlon 64 3800+ 939pin 512Kb L2 Cache 90nm Retail Boxed Processor With 3 Year Warranty and Fan Included
1 x Kingston 1GB DDR PC2700 333MHz Non-ecc CL2.5 Memory Module 55910
1 x XFX GeForce 7900GT 470M XTREME 256MB GDDR3 256bit PCI-E 113872
1 x LG GSA-H10NBAL 16x16DVD±RW 12x RAM Dual Layer Writer Black
1 x Microsoft OEM Windows XP Home SP2B (Release 2) x32bit - 1PK 114048
1 x Seagate 250gb Nl35 Drive Sata Ii 7200rpm 16mb Cache - Oem
1 x Seagate 250gb Barracuda 7200.9 - ST3250824A ( 8mb cache)
1 x Seagate 40gb Barracuda ATA IV - ST340016A

Also, not exactly a problem, but an annoyance for me :

The SATA drive appears as a mass storage device once windows is loaded. The drive shows up inside My Computer, but i cant seem to get rid of this Mass storage notification.
Any ideas and suggestions to things that would resolve any of these issues would be greatly appreciated.
Also, i may arrange to set up a RMA for the ATA 250gb hard disk, but also wanted to point out, that i have the jumper setting on the SATA hard disk to 3gb/s inistead of 1.5gb/s - should this be changed?
Thanks
MuftiMan

[CCT]

The Seagates are supposed to ship with the jumper in Sata 1 position - however, many people report no problems with setting either way on Sata 1 boards.

Notwithstanding any of that, if your mobo only supports sata 1 (like yours) the 'proper' thing is to have the jumper set for Sata 1.

In my Asus P5GD1 bios I set my configure sata as = IDE with onboard ide operate mode = enhanced.

[Platypus]

Which controller is the SATA drive on? ASUS state SATA II for that board, but what little reading I've been able to do suggests that's only the nVidia controller. There have been instances of SATA and IDE not co-existing well together, so you could try using the other SATA controller, but be very careful when swapping SATA controllers not to enable/disable any RAID options or you risk corrupting your filesystem.

I assume all the board drivers are correctly installed and up-to-date, and the drives all show correct parameters in Device Manager, eg Ultra DMA mode? Anything in PIO mode?

Also, just to check if the pin incident has upset your IDE, have you checked transfer using the 40G drive alone as Master (or Single Drive depending on brand) on the IDE channel?

I only have one SATA drive myself, set up in BIOS as IDE, so I can't say for sure, but I think it's common for SATA to appear as a Mass Storage Device because SATA is hot-swappable, so has to be handled as a removable drive. CCT's suggestion of configure the SATA as IDE may solve the drive designation issue, but I don't think it's actually a problem.

And, welcome to WinDrivers.

[muftiman]

The problem is that i dont know how to see if the drive is in PIO mode or DMA - any tips?
I've done copying from the 40gb to the SATA, all seems to be fine, however copying from the 250gb ATA to SATA and the 40gb is less than half the speed i.e a 6gb file takes 30 minutes to copy from the SATA to 250GB and vice versa, where it takes 10 minuters from the 40gb to the SATA.

Also, how would i go about checking the controller for the SATA drive?

Thanks again.
Muftiman

[muftiman]

The Seagates are supposed to ship with the jumper in Sata 1 position - however, many people report no problems with setting either way on Sata 1 boards.

Notwithstanding any of that, if your mobo only supports sata 1 (like yours) the 'proper' thing is to have the jumper set for Sata 1.

In my Asus P5GD1 bios I set my configure sata as = IDE with onboard ide operate mode = enhanced.

I just checked my mobo manual, it says that it supports SATAII =/

[muftiman]

Hey guys, thanks alot for all your help, i guess all i needed was a push in the right direction. Looks like my HDD was operating in PIO mode, so a quick google pointed me to a guide that let me change it to UDMA.
Everythings working top notch now, if anything, transfers to the SATA are actually faster from either drive.

Thanks alot guys. Ill be recommending you to friends in the future

[NooNoo]

Thanks for posting your fix and recommendations are always welcome.

[CCT]

Sorry about the misread on your sata 2 compatability - I looked quickly at Asus' site and they don't say sata 2 or II - I missed the 3GBs reference.

Anyhow, all's well that ends well.