08.12.05
New HDD, part 2
Well, exceeding 1TB was exciting. I had a small problem though with the install, and it’s one that seems to recur every time I try it – the nVidia IDE drivers are broken. Under load they just crap out and kill the OS, or even worse just write crap to the disk. I don’t know how something like that got through QA but I keep believing that next revisions might be better however every time I install them I get bitten again!
This time I was moving 160G of captured video to the new HDD (don’t you love digital video cams?) using KillCopy and it was just dying after only a half gig or so. Well, killcopy does stress the system (because it’s a damn fast copy utility) so I tried again with plain old xcopy and got the same thing.
Only one thing for it – into device manager and install the standard Microsoft IDE drivers for everything, which work acceptably well on my nForce4 board. Changed them over easily enough and rebooted only to find that XP decided to put my main SATA drive in PIO mode – with hdtach telling me the throughput was something below 10M/s at 100% CPU load which is completely unacceptable.
So… back to google to find something useful and after some quick hunting I found the solution at this helpful web site. To summarize I opened up the registry editor, went to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SYSTEM\ CurrentControlSet\ Control\ Class\ {4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} and fished around for the blahblahDataChecksum values which I promptly deleted. On the next reboot – magically DMA mode 6 and hdtach reporting 65M/s sustained, 140M/s burst at approximately 0% CPU usage. Much, much better!
So, I set the copy going and went to bed. It finished eventually. Even with fast drives, 160G is a lot of data to move around.