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

 

[MrCoffee]

yeah change it to 1.5GB/s

if that doesn't fix you transfer speed problems then check the ATA drive to kame sure they're running in DMA mode and not PIO.

 

[Nitestick]

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.

that is because SATA drives are hot swappable and can be connected or disconnected while a PC is running, though should only be done with a hot swap bay.

if that doesn't fix you transfer speed problems then check the ATA drive to kame sure they're running in DMA mode and not PIO.

highly likely.

 

[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]

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