Is SMART always enabled with SATA drives?

[Bires]

I have an abit IS7. I recently installed a maxtor dm 10+ 16MB SATA drive. The problem is it has it's acoustic thing enabled, smart enabled, and is only transfering at ata100.

I've looked all over the bios and updated and the whole shooting match...nothing. Am I blind? Where in the IS7's bios is the ability to turn off SMART? :throw:

[Bires]

OK...nothing...

Stumped I guess.


Well, after extensive research I've uncovered that Maxtor sometimes ships their fastest drives to consumers with acoustic management enabled.

So, anyone know what proggie maxtor uses to disable it? I've been googling all day, and nothing yet has been fruitful.

[hapoo]

Maxtor used to have utilities on its website to en/disable features. i'm sure they're still there if you look.

[Bires]

Maxtor used to have utilities on its website to en/disable features. i'm sure they're still there if you look.

Oh...I've looked. DAYUM!!!! I'VE LOOKED! I'm either blind or nuts, but I can't find it ANYWHERE! :censored:

[shocky123]

Normally you'd do those changes in the BIOS under Advanced Settings.. (where it lists the hard drives.. etc).. ..or there is sometimes an option in the IDE Configuration Settings menus.
As far as I know from my work with SATA drives, I've never seen SMART mode produce a noticable/detectable decrease in performance. The accoustic settings are likely the reason behind any poor performance. I'm not incredibly familiar with the design of the feature, but I would venture to say that the drive likely spins down or slows down rather at some point in operation where it could be 'loud'. This will greatly decrease your speed.. Unfortunately I don't believe I've ever seen a BIOS that had built-in support for a Maxtor-only feature. Your best bet for that option would be to try to find something through Maxtor's website that allows you to flash a new firmware or modify settings on the drive to disable the accoustic features.
If you're connected to an SATA port on the motherboard, you're on a 150MByte/sec interface. How did you determine that you're running in ata100 mode???? is that a measurement that is made in reference to a regular ATA interface or something?

What is the setup on your computer?

I'm sure you've probably already looked this up.. but, here's what your manual says:
"OnChip Serial ATA [Mode]" Set to "1" or "Enhanced Mode" for SATA1/2

Mkay, so I googled it, and found a forum where someone said Maxtor has/had a program online called AMSet that allowed you to change the Accoustic Management settings on the drive. I looked for it on maxtor's site and couldnt immediately find it.

I'd say try a google on AMSet or other Accoustic Management 'set-able' programs out there, I'm sure there are many since Maxtor ships it's drives out w/ AM defaulted to ON (well.. the 9+ series did at least, the specs on the 10+ didnt say anything about it's default AM settings)

Good luck

~Kyle

[Bires]

I got amset. Turned off acoustic management...no change bios still sees it as only ATA100.

So, I called Maxtor. The tech csr was a decent chap. He told me that SMART is locked on on all serial ATA drives. He recommended that I run powmax, which I had already done, but I did it anyway. No problems detected. Maxblast told me the same thing that Sandra tells me-the drive is running at ATA-100, not ATA-150, although it has the capability.

So, my attention would be on the motherboard (Abit IS7 (i865), with newest 24 bios), but I tried the same drive in my dell 400SC (i875), and it gives me the same result: ATA-100, not ATA-150.

I don't have any other SATA controllers to test, to see if it's a problem with the controller.

This angers me to no end, as this drive is running slower than my 80GB 8MB cache diamondmaxes that I had intended to replace. :disa: