secondary hard drive speed

[CloudTP]

I have a THINKPAD A31p with two 60GB hard drives. I also have an external 160GB maxtor connected via firewire. When I copy a 1GB file from C: to the maxtor it takes 1 minute. When I copy the same file from E: to the maxtor it takes almost 7 minutes! Read/Write, it's the same thing. And it's not the drive, because I tried another drive in the E: slot and had the same result. What else can cause this problem?

thanks,
Paul

 

[Mulga]

In device manager make sure that dma is enabled for both drives. All things are possible except skiing through a revolving door.

 

[ceh4702]

Some mobile computers like laptops have slower deives. A normal speed may be 4,200 rpm for a hard drive on some models. Some hard drives are ide and some are the plug-in type (PCMCIA) I am not sure what is faster. If 2 drives are on the same channel, they may be competing for bandwidth. If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[CloudTP]

PROBLEM SOLVED!

The CD-R DVD drive was forcing the primary channel to DMA MODE 2 and therefore the second drive along with it. The only way to get DMA MODE 5 is to have the two drives as a master/slave on one channel and the cd/dvd on the secondary channel.