Mac Pro SATA Performance Fixed under Windows XP

I've made many attempts only using the SATA drivers integrated and Boot Camp 1.1 after the OS install.

My Windows disk is a build 0, so I'm also having to move it up to SP2.

Other than trying a different Windows disk altogether, my next attempt is to try and remove the IDE Bus drivers. In nLite's choices there are drivers from ALI, CMD, Intel, Toshiba, and VIA. Also there is a driver for ATM Support. My first attempt would be to try to remove the Intel IDE Bus driver and integrate the updated SATA driver. Second attempt would be to try and remove all of those, unless someone has a better suggestion.

I followed the instructions exactly, and it worked.

HD performance under XP is as fast as that under Mac OS now. I forget what DMA mode it listed (some multi mode DMA, certianly not PIO), but it wasn't subjectively any slower than the Mac side of things anymore.

The fix works.

At last!!! Finally got it working!

I put a new drive in and installed directly onto it after removing the other 3 drives (no Bootcamp), getting 67Mb/s.

I also get about 151 burst from a WD 250 stock from Apple and 160 burst from a WD SE16 Caviar 320... but you need to remember that these burst speeds are highly effected by the cache RAM on the drives. I would suspect that any drive with a good size cache is going to have these large burst rates. They are more or less meaningless as an indicator of drive performance.

Tom N.

Its wierd that a separate drive did the install correctly.

I don't want to either A) put money into a new drive or B) designate a new SATA drive to XP.

I wonder if it would work to wipe the 250 stock drive clean (after cloning the Mac side), install windows on it, clone using Norton Ghost to a disk, restore my mac OS to the drive and partition with bootcamp, and finally ghost back the copy of windows.

Good god, this is making me remember how much of a pain computing was before I started using macs.

Interesting observation,

The only time i had a succesfull install was when i removed all the other drives and only had a single destination drive installed.

At last!!! Finally got it working!

I put a new drive in and installed directly onto it
after removing the other 3 drives (no Bootcamp),
getting 67Mb/s.

Andy R, can you elaborate with more detail as to what procedure you followed. What do you mean when you say you "removed the other 3 drives (no Bootcamp)" Thanks!!

I have drives in all 4 bays and had tried to install XP using bootcamp onto the OSX drive, which I gave up on because of the problems I had.

Eventually I got a new drive, put that into bay 1 - pulled out the other 3 (so they wouldn't get recognised and confuse me... so easy these days!!) and then installed without using the bootcamp utillity... You can put the XP CD in and boot/install directly from that.

I don't know why, but it just worked.

Now it's just a case of finding out how I back-up the XP partition - Disk Utility in OSX won't copy it, so i'm trying Drive Image 7 at the moment, although it's VVVEEERRRYYY slow because it boots directly from a CD (you have to do the old F7 trick to load extra drivers), so for restore I'm back to 3Mb/s... AGGHHH!

The only point of bootcamp is to partition a single drive so that OSX and XP can both see it (and make you a handy driver disc), if you have separate drives, bootcamp is pointless.

It's strange that a NCQ Raptor with 16MB cache would get a lower burst at 110MB/s vs. the stock NCQ Caviar with 16MB cache at 150MB/s burst, other than being meaningless numbers, is there an explanation for this?

SH



Mac Pro Mac OS X (10.4.7)

SH,

WD chose to hold off on 3GB/sec mode for the Raptor feeling that a 10K drive needed higher level of testing and parts to achieve and the Raptor has been rock solid "flagship" for 3 yrs.

It was only when I did a ZoneBench test of 1-4MB file size that I got 125MB/seec on my 74GB (16MB cache) Raptor WD740ADFD.

It reports Multi DMA 2 in Device manager for me. I haven't had time to try HD Tune but subjectively it feels just as fast as it does in Mac OS X.

I call it fixed for sure. Windows boots up in seconds to a completed desktop now; before the fix it took a couple minutes.

I have read in other online forums that the WinXP SP-2 disk you use in this process cannot be a Dell OEM disk since it is set to look for Dell-specific hardware and thus will not install properly on a Mac Pro. I am ditching my old Dell and have no intention of violating copyright restrictions, but I hate to spend a bundle on a new copy of Windows when I already own a licensed copy. Does anyone have any information on whether this will work?

Fixed up ... took some time since the procedure call to go low level ... well i am a fast disk accessing PC now Thanks a load for the effort though Windows is kind of wasted on me .. hehe i am a mac person .. the whole interface feels clunky and photocopied from mac os X .The programs dont even run as good as they do on MosX (Yes , even the poorly ported thingies we have on Mac os X) .. but well ,BootCamp is just a transition so people running in "Classic2" aka win XP can run their old thingies before Developpers come running to the mac for many reasons.. (Apis documentation might be part of it ) ...

I hope that Apple Posts a definitive fix on the issue so that everyone can benefit as soon as possible of the whole thing... you end up with a load of data that just is not necessary... (XP licence) your XpLight and the Apple drivers.

Anyhow, thanks again to all the tech oriented people for providing this non offical fix ... oh detail .. HD access jumped to 70ish something on a Poorman's 120 GB partition...



MacPro Quad 2.66 Ghz 8GB ram 4500GB7200 HD Mac OS X (10.4.7) Mac Os X server 10.4.7

os X .The programs dont even run as good as they do
on MosX (Yes , even the poorly ported thingies we
have on Mac os X) .. but well ,BootCamp is just a

You are so right. The caching, the use of the processors by the OS seems much smoother under Mac OS X than Win XP.