Maxtor - SATA - ACMSet & WVSet ?

[iMogal]

When I load up the AMSet, and WVSet programs from Maxtor, the two programs refuse to detect the drives.
- I have both a IDE and SATA drive from Maxtor.

So those of you that have SATA drives how do/did you adjust the accustic management of the HDDs?
And ensure the the Write Verify is OFF on the drives?
- Yes, I know, after 10 cold boots it should automatically disable the write verify

This is what Sandra reports:



Can yea help me to optimize my drives?

[CrowdAds]

[celsmk]

iMogal, you need to create a DOS boot disquette, set BIOS IDE Operation mode to "Compatible Mode" and boot from disquete.
Now AMSet will be able to find your SATA drives.

[iMogal]

Great! I'll give it a try and report back...

[celsmk]

One more advice: AMSet options are somewhat misleading.
===========================================
A:\Maxtor>amset /?

AmSet v4.00

Incorrect command switch

USAGE:
COMMAND LINE FLAGS
/fast - Fastest seeks
/quiet - Quietest seeks
/off - Acoustic Management Off
/check - Display the current Acoustic Management Mode settings

EXAMPLE COMMAND LINE INPUTS
AMSET /fast

AmSet performs indicated action on all connected Maxtor drives.

===========================================
You may want to "amset /off", instead of "amset /fast", if you want to get rid of Sandra performance warnings.
Seems that "/fast -Fastest seeks" does not turn off Acoustic Management, and Sandra will detect this status.

[iMogal]

It didn't work.

BIOS settings:
Compatable mode P-ATA / S-ATA
Drives came up as Primary master / Secondary master
- Gave an error on CDRoms...

Created a boot disk with PCDOS700, copied AMSet, and WVSet to it. Booted to the floppy, and exicuted the programs, and they came back with the error:

'CAN NOT BE RUN FROM DOS' WTF I say!!

So I booted into windows, and they dropped to a DOS box?!?!
Err....

The drives are formatted with NTFS, dunno if that makes a diff.

any other pointers?

[celsmk]

iMogal,
I did the following:
1) Created a bootable disquete (right click on A:, format selecting "Create an MS-DOS startup disk" in WinXP);
2) Downloaded setacm here .
3) Executed setacm.exe, which will expand several files.
4) Copied amset.exe and chipset.drv to floppy disk
5) Rebooted PC, changing bios (IDE to "compatible mode", 1st boot device = floppy)
6) Got DOS prompt from floppy; execute "amset /off"

The output should look something like this:

AmSet v4.00

Searching for Maxtor Drives on Primary port.....
Searching for Drive 0 ..... No drive found.
Searching for Drive 1 ..... No drive found.
Searching for Maxtor Drives on Secondary port.....

....now it would find my Maxtor drive and set Acoustic Management off.

[celsmk]

Just to clarify better, I have no PATA drives and 2 SATA drives, both off ICH5R. My board is P4P800 (non-deluxe) and therefore I have no extra SATA ports off Promise (P4C800-Deluxe) or Via (P4P800-Deluxe) controllers.

[iMogal]

Wow... I finally got it to work, but got a major glitch in the end!!
Corrupted the boot sector, and the drive is now totally unreadable.

I had some stuff on there that is going to be hard to replace

HAHAHAHAHAHAHHA!! what a dumass... I'm both laughing and crying!!
Guess I'm spending the next couple hours rebuilding!!

Well, live and learn.

Well, thanx for your help celsmk.

I set the drives to performance. after the rebuild, I'll make a few back-ups... :eek: :o

[celsmk]

Oh man, that sucks

But as per your sig, PC=Box of lost hours, right ?

[iMogal]

Lost hours alright....

Well, it sucked to loose my stuff, but I needed to house clean anyways :o

I gained about 100 PCMarks making the change though...

But now the problem is, I get about 1350PCMarks with the single SATA drive. As soon as I plug in my IDE drive, my PCMarks drop from the 1350 to 850 on the SATA drive! :eek: I unplug the IDE, and the performance returns.

Maxtor 120Gig SATA = Intel ICHR5
Maxtor 40Gig IDE = Primary Master (IDE 0)
CDRW/DVD = Primary/Seconday (IDE 1)
(Promise controllers are not used)

I thought that the drive speed only affected the channel? not the system? (Or is there something else I'm missing here?)
CDRoms make no difference to the system perfromace.

[celsmk]

PCMARK2002 FAQ says the following: "Q: How are the PCMark total scores (CPU, Memory, HDD) calculated?
A: The total score formulas can be found in the PCMark help file. "

Also found that HDD testing score may vary here .

I do not know well PCMark, but my wild guess is that PCMark is also testing your 40G IDE and lowering the compound value.

[iMogal]

I know about the variations with benchmarks, I just use PCMark as a quick refference... Sandra Max3 reports roughly the same percentage in gain/loss with the IDE issue. Same with ATTO.

When the drive slows down that much, you can tell the diff :o

I'm just wondering why it does?!

[celsmk]

Dunno why this is happening to you
I did tests with my old 9GB ATA66 Seagate connecting it to ICH5R PATA Primary IDE channel. With or without it, my SATA drives performance were the same or about the same...at least that was what AIDA32 was telling me

[iMogal]

Well, I have removed the IDE drive form the system.
It was going into the server anyways

BUT!

For future reference, this is still nice to know. I will try and put the IDE onto the promise controller and see what happens there.
- I'm almost thinking its the IDE drive itself, it never has been a great performer.

I kinda wish someone else could jump into the conversation and give some other ideas?!?! ANYONE help out?

[iMogal]

I just recieved an email from Maxtor. (On Sat night?!?!)

-----
I regret to inform you that the AMSET utility was made for a specific line of hard drives that are no longer in manufacturing. There is no utility that Maxtor provides that allows this functionality. I apologize for the inconvenience.
-----

So this explains why the drive corrupted!! Doh! :eek: