Best VIA drivers for 503+

External Since: Oct 13, 2003 Posts: 1

What are the best VIA 3/4 in 1 drivers for the 503+? I don't seem to be
getting much throughput from my disk drives...

Thanks,

Pat

External Since: Oct 09, 2003 Posts: 22

It may depend on the OS; 98/ME, 2000, XP? In the majority of cases,
the native MS IDE drivers are best all-around. I have read some cases
requiring the VIA IDE/Miniport driver when using 2000 or XP, but they
seem to be the exception rather than the rule.

First thing, check if your drives are using DMA transfers by looking
at the device settings page for the drive in Device Manager. If the
DMA box is not selected (no check mark), then you're using the much
slower PIO mode. Select DMA for each IDE drive and restart your
computer. Then go back to Device Manager to verify that the DMA box
remained selected after restarting. If it did not, then the driver
isn't detecting your drives as supporting DMA. It may be the drive,
it may be the driver, and we can go from there.

Also enter BIOS SETUP to verify that UDMA mode is enabled for your IDE
drives (under Integrated Peripherals). Otherwise, your IDE drives are
restricted to MultiWord DMA Mode 2 (MWDMA2), which has a maximum
throughput of 16MB/sec vs. 33MB/sec for UDMA Mode 2.

Regards,

Tim

"Vincent Patterson" wrote in message news:<bme4n701nng RemoveThis @enews1.newsguy.com>...

> What are the best VIA 3/4 in 1 drivers for the 503+? I don't seem to be
> getting much throughput from my disk drives...
>
> Thanks,
>
> Pat