Maxtor 6L300S0 Very Erratic

[Anthony666]

I have now removed the WD drive and have installed XP Pro on the maxtor. All seems well so far although it's too early to say for sure, had no problems on install and transfers between partitions on the drive have been fast and smooth. I moved the DVD-RW onto the primary P-ATA ide channel 1 which is where the WD drive was and it seems to work perfectly.

I still have no idea what the problem was, maybe the PSU i guess.. it's rated as 28a on the 3.3v, 30a on the 5v and 15a on the 12v. I would have thought this was ok for my setup but it's not really an area I fully understand.

I guess i'm just going to leave it there.... it's annoying, 2 drives would have really suited my purpose but i'm so tired of the problem that i will just take what i can get, I haven't been able to record anything in weeks and people are nagging me!

Thanks to everyone for all the advice ! ! ! ! ! !

 

[RicoDirenzo]

For the 40 gigs additional, I woun't worry about it. Sell it on ebay and buy yourself another 250 SATA. I have 700 gigs of storage on my DAW. Backiing up waves and track data is an absolute must!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Anthony666]

I have been testing the PC this morning and it wasn't good. I thought that because the reinstall had gone well the problem was solved, but no. The system seemed stable but when trying the method i previously described to create the error, alas the PC completely froze and i had to press the reset.

I considered the possibility put forward that it might be the soundcard conflict and removed it completely. This seemed to totally solve the problem and i couldn't make it crash. I then reinserted the soundcard into another PCI slot, and the problem occurred again, then another slot and now it seems stable. (although i have thought that a couple of times so far! but i can't intentionaly crash it now at least).

I have to make it clear though that the IRQ wasn't being shared in any of the 3 PCI slots i used, it moved from IRQ21 to IRQ7 and finaly IRQ22, the P-ATA is 14 & 15, the S-ATA is 18. None of these were being shared with anything except 18 with a usb host controller. (Is it worth disabling this, i don't use it??)
In the BIOS, although the IRQ's were different there were still no conflicts at all.

I had previously checked all this as i have had problems with IRQ before on other PC's so i would probably have never considered this. I never had any such problems with my P-ATA ports so the conflict must be between PCI slots 3 & 4 (of 4) and the S-ATA connector.
How can it occur that two devices can interfere like this? How am i supposed to know this if no conflicts appear in the system information?

Thanks everyone (Again)

Let's hope that's the end now..

 

[RicoDirenzo]

Like I said, those PCI cards suck up a lot of band width. The older PCI card for Alesis Adat Connect could not share any resources and had to be manually assigned to it's own IRQ. sharing with the USB hub shouldn't be a problem, but apparently it is! I have not had these IRq conflicts since I started using Intel Mobo's. My ASUS mobo has the same problems that you are facing. For reasons which I cannot explain, Intel mobo's architectures are more suitable for DAW applications. I think it may be that the other mobo manufacturers are designing boards with gamers in mind. Plug and Play is a great feature until you need to do manual assigning of IRQ's because of DAW applications. Is everything ok now?

 

[Anthony666]

Yeah thanks, everything seems to be working as it should. I haven't yet done any multi-track recording which is the main purpose for this machine so it hasn't been fully tested yet. Should get the software installed later and will post back on result.

Although it seems to have fixed the problem I am no closer understanding what is was really. I don't understand how these two PCI slots are connected in any way to the S-ATA IDE's channels. I wonder if i am going to be able to use those PCI slots for anything (I need a firewire card for DV soon) or if they are useless to me now?

on another point.. check this out and let me know what you think?
http://forumz.tomshardware.com/hardware/PC-Music-Production-ftopict172115.html