Because one of my drive reports via S.M.A.R.T. that a failure is imminent, I decided to turn of SMART. But, this Asus bios is not tricked easy: even with SMART off, it reports the error. So, I decided to switch of the IDE channel in the BIOS because my boot-device is a SCSI disk (IDE only used for storage). Windows booted fine, without the error.
But…you guessed it, Windows talked to the drive in PIO mode, no DMA at all. WTF? Back to the bios, let’s get the error and the speed back. Hey, there’s the error, but where’s Windows?
After several tries, reboots, settings, I can now only use my system with the IDE controller switched of in the BIOS, therefore the speed of this machine dramatically drops when I use the IDE disk.
Can someone explain this to me?