DOS Games Discussion

Hi again,

I have a older computer, as is the norm around here, a Celeron 1000Mhz, running XP. I recently picked up a PCI SATA Controller card, so I could take advantage of the Seagate 320GB 7200.10 I had. I moved all my music and pictures, a total of about 25GB, plus movies and other things to take load of my main IDE drive. Now I've started to notice that when a program is actively using the SATA drive it pauses the system for about 2 seconds every 5 or so. As an example, I have iTunes using the music from the SATA drive, and I let it run overnight it's 'Determining Gapless Playback Information' and it got through 550 of 4600. The same pauses occur when I run my defragger on the drive (but not on the other one.) When nothing is using the SATA drive the computer runs fine. Thanks in advance for your help.

There shouldn't be delays, and speed should be faster than IDE. However, looking at your processor (Celeron 1000MHz) I would have suggested IDE, before even recommending SATA for your machine!
It is delaying due to the system bus in your machine - it really can't handle it!

Indeed, Celeron 1ghz+XP+SATA PCI card, not a good idea.
The drivers supplied for such stuff aren't top notch.
Better stick with IDE.
Or a USB2 <-> external SATA HD box.
(Even better external SATA HD box <-> LAN connectible).
Doesn't cost more then a PCI card, and with own power supply.
And you can drag your HD everywhere you want.

What pci card are you using?

I was using a 3ware 9500S-12 sata pci card on a P3B-f. It ran fine for 2 months. It froze during boot up a couple of times. Then failed to boot. Reflashed the bios. Worked fine then failed again. Reflash of the bios then failed. Plugged the sata HDD into another pci card but it would not detect it, and would slow the IDE drive down exactly as you describe. The XP "loading bar" pauses for a couple of seconds every five seconds or so.

Plugged the sata drive into another PC, but it could not detect it, so data is not accessible, unless I suspect I acquire another 9500S. Mal, mal, mal...

In future I will avoid any and all such pci sata cards, in favor of this:
http://www.darkwire.com.au/html/ata_ide ... ta__i.html

I should also add that although the IDE port on my mobo runs at a mere 33mb/s, and the pci card had a theoretical B/W of 133mb/s, I did not detect any real difference when using an IDA HDD vs sata HDD, both 7200rpm types. Maybe an SSD sata drive would prove the IDE port to be a major bottleneck, but given the difficulties I described above, especially in not being able to access data on a drive outside of a working pci card of the same make, I could not care less.