I recently purchased a WD SATA2 320gb hard drive to to add to my fileserver at home to bring it to ~2TB. I bought the SATA2 drive thinking I wouldnt have any major dramas trying to run it off a SATA onboard mobo controller. What ensued was 2 days of pain, frustration and a lot of killing. (ok, maybe not the last part.)
Anyway, my fileserver is nothing special, just a streamlimed copy of WinXP running on an Asus P4C800 motherboard and 2gigs of ram. The P4C800 motherboard only has a SATA1 controller onboard - which is ok, since the mobo is a couple of years old. After installing the new hdd, to my disappointment, Windows XP kept running it in PIO mode instead of DMA.
For those who do not know, PIO is a slow and inefficient data transfer mode when XP isnt able to use DMA. PIO mode is much, much slower than DMA. I was actually getting a ridiculous 3MB/sec data transfer rate compared to ~13-14MB/sec which you normally get.
Anyway, I tried everything from jumper’ing the hdd to sata1 mode via its jumper pins, the mobo BIOS, drivers, numerous registry ‘fixes’ that other people have gotten to work etc etc but nothing worked, until I came across this fix a couple of hours ago.
To anyone who comes across this page via Google and is looking for an answer, this is what worked for me:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SYSTEM > CURRENTCONTROLSET > CONTROL > CLASS > {4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
Create a DWORD entry called EnableUDMA100 with the value set as “1“.
Do this for each sub directory (0000,0001,0002,0003,0004..) and reboot.
This is what worked for me 
Five of us met up today for a quick dash to Wisemans Ferry. The weather, roads and the drive itself was awesome. Although we only had a small group compared to the previous cruises (15+), we had heaps of fun driving ’spiritidly’ 
I managed to take some good shots with my new camera - didnt take many as I was running low on battery and space on my CF card (2GB but I usually shoot in RAW - i.e zero compression).
Anyway, I’ve uploaded all the pictures I took here. (Total images: 29)
Some of my favourite ones:
I picked up my newest toy earlier this week - the all new and super cool Canon 400D - (Rebel XTi for all you yanks). Its a digital SLR camera and takes awesome 10 megapixel shots with my 18-55mm and 70-300mm lenses.
I had a hard time trying to decide between the newer (and more expensive) 400D, the Canon 350D and the Nikon D70. I took into considering the LCD size, the features and ultimately the higher resolution (10.1megapixel) resolution of the 400D. While there isnt much of a difference between the 350D and the 400D apart from the slightly higher resolution and an increase in LCD screen size, the deciding factor was the fact that the newer 400D addresses the really annoying problem of dust settling on the sensor filter.
If you’re already into dSLR’s, you probably already know that dust is the bane of dSRL existence especially during long exposures. Not only does it have a ultra-cool dust cleaning feature (piezoelectric crystals ’shake’ the filter in front of the sensor during boot) it also uses advanced dust-mapping algorithms to map the location of dust spots and remove them in post.
Canon has even released a video demonstrating the self-cleaning feature:
Hey pple!
I’ve finally got around to fixing/updating my site. I’ve moved from greymatter to wordpress and in the process, have lost a significant number of posts. Anyway, whats left is here and archived so hopefully they wont be going anywhere any time soon!
Enjoy.
