Super slow PATA

M

M4573R

Gawd
Joined
Jul 30, 2006
Messages
522
My friend has a prebuilt dell with windows xp and a sata hard drive in it, and it's tiny so I put a 120 gig pata in it. Problem is, it takes around 15 minutes just to copy a gig from the sata to the new hard drive. Why is it running so slow?
 
make sure your HD is using the correct PATA cable, stay away from the 40 pins cable. You also have to enable UDMA on the BIOS
 
yeah the cable could be ata33 or 66 instead of 100 or (preferred) 133
 
This seems like a really dumb question, but I can flip the cable around to make it reach places right? Even though it was MASTER and SLAVE and stuff written all over it. Also, how can tell what speed the cable is? I don't see anything on the cable to indicate its speed.

Looks like it was a 40 pin cable. I found another one that barely reached that actually said 133 on it, so it should be good. Stuff in the bios was messed up to.
 
40 pin but 80 conductor. If it's 40 pin/40 conductor, you have an old PATA cable. They doubled up the conductors to add ground lines and clean up noise.when they increased the speed.

You can't just reverse the cable. You can connect the drive to either the master or slave connector, though. You can force the drive into master or slave mode with the jumpers or just set it to cable select and let it figure it out from the position its plugged in. If you only have one PATA drive, it shouldn't matter.
 
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