Windows can hose your drive performance (and lie about it)

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The Masked Marauder
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Windows can hose your drive performance (and lie about it)

Post by The Masked Marauder »

I was looking up a shareware program called PTFB (Push The Freakin' Button) and found the developer's blog. He had recently fixed a weird problem with his IDE DVD burner. If you work on Windows machines, his story is worth reading:
The gist of it is, if you have an IDE drive of any type that has repeated errors (including trying to read a bad CD or DVD), Windows will downgrade the drive's operating mode from UDMA to PIO. It won't tell you that it has done this, and all of the obvious places to look (like Device Manager) still claim that the drive is in UDMA mode. The only indication that you had any problems is Atapi error messages in the Event Log. There are several ways to bring the drive back up to speed; this article explains them:
I agree with the need for downgrading performance when errors occur. But the least that Windows could do is tell you in an obvious way what it has done.... :evil:
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