Hi there!

I've bought a new PC recently and wanted to use my "old" Plextor drives (716 and Premium) with that new PC. The mainboard (Asus P6T Deluxe V2) only has one IDE port (Marvell chipset), so I have to use that with these IDE drives. Everything works fine, but EAC: If I try to rip a CD, one core of the CPU gets a 100% usage (should be not a problem) and the whole system is stuttering (e.g. music playback is ridiculously slowed down - sounds like setting playback speed to maybe 20%; also the effects of Windows while minimizing/maximizing windows are not running smooth anymore).
This only happens when using the IDE drives (with a SATA drive, there's no problem) and only with EAC (ripping with dbpoweramp, music or video playback, copying files, etc. from the IDE drives works perfectly well).

I've already played around with some EAC settings (especially with the interface option), but nothing seems to help.
Next thing I've had a look at was the DMA mode of the IDE drives, which were enabled. Also no problems with IRQs (there's only a USB port with the same interrupt, but even when disabling it, same problem occurs).
Latest Intel chipset drives are also installed.

Any clue what else could cause this problem?

I'm using Windows 7 Ultimate (64bit).

Yes, your old drives are probably generating a lot of I/O errors, possibly at the IDE interface level.

I've noticed that IDE drives that are marginal will behave better or worse on the IDE ports of different motherboards. If you want to try an alternative with that motherboard, try running the drive via one of those USB to IDE converters. Also, you can obtain PCI cards with IDE ports.

Is it possible to log such I/O errors?

But the strange thing is that this problem only occurs with EAC. If it were a general problem, it could possibly be a crappy IDE port on the mainboard or something like that. But that's not the case...

If there were many I/O errors, would the drive not revert out of DMA mode?

try a different IDE cable and/or check there no pins bent/broken on the drive/connector.

How would that help? The problem doesn't exist with other programs, just EAC.

My guess is that the IDE interface is having a problem with the read command that EAC is using.

This seems to be that combined problem of EAC and the driver for the IDE chipset.
Try this tool and see if the deferred procedure calls would cause high latencies.

http://www.thesycon.de/eng/latency_check.shtml

You can also get Process Explorer, it has the ability to show you the CPU load caused by programs (green) and hardware interrupts (red) seperately. Basically it's similar to DPL.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinte...s/bb896653.aspx

PS: I have this problem, too, with my SATA drive. Ripping with EAC causes audio dropouts in foobar2000.

I've had bad cables, especially older non-ata100 cables cause really funky problems with cd/dvd drives.

Yes, if this is the same problem that I have, I can confirm that EAC is causing the latencies, for unknown reasons. Maybe the way EAC accesses the drives is a bit unusual and stressful.

EAC is written in Modula-2 or -3, isn't it? Maybe the framework used for accessing hardware devices is a bit... I don't know.

@ greynol, ok I misread/missed that part

I've tried this tool and there are no DPC when ripping fom my IDE drives (always stays in the green area).
I've also tried to disable some other devices in the device manager - first of all my soundcard (Auzentech X-Fi Forte), tried it with onboard sound, because the sound stuttering is the most obvious - but really nothing seems to help...

I'm curious about this too. What's the behavior of Windows 7 when it comes to PIO fallback?

Exec said he check the DMA setting, which was enabled. But this doesn't tell the active mode. The drives could be set to "DMA if available" but be operating in PIO mode.

I had this same problem. What it was is that the IDE mode has to be added on with an additional chip because the chipset dropped support for IDE. In the BIOS, I bet IDE devices are set to be run in AHCI mode or something to that effect. IIRC, I had to change it to the default mode which I cannot remember the name for this to work correctly. I also remember that when doing so, it caused the drive to disappear in Windows and I had to do something to get it back. I'm not at home right now, but I will check out the BIOS setting later when I return and let you know.

I think Windows 7 is similar to Vista, in that when a drive enters PIO mode, it will self revert out given a couple of discs.

Alright I'm home and I was able to check the BIOS for the setting I had to change. In my case I have a ASUS P5k Deluxe with a J-Micron 363 controller that handles the IDE. In the BIOS, I changed:

Advanced -> Onboard Device Configuration:

J-Micron eSATA/PATA Controller

• RAID
• IDE *
• AHCI

I had mine set to AHCI and I experienced the same problems as you did with my Plextor Premium. I don't know if the problem lies with Plextor, with the J-Micron controller (I doubt it now since you said you have Marvel), or with Windows. The choice that worked for me was IDE. Also you may need to update your drivers from the manufactor's site if you don't have the latest version. I remember Windows didn't recognize the drive after I set it to IDE mode. Once I updated the drivers from J-Micron (instead of using the ones that ASUS provided), it showed up fine.

Hope this helps.

I too have a P5K with the Jmicron PoS controller. I hope nothing about that controller is common.

Thanks for your help, but my BIOS doesn't have such options for the Marvel controller. I only could switch all devices from AHCI to IDE mode. But then I would sacrifice such things as NCQ on the HDDs, so I don't know...

Edit: One thing seems a little strange to me: the 716A runs in UDMA 5 mode (that's ok), but the Premium is only UDMA 2. Shouldn't that be a faster UDMA mode or was UDMA 2 state of the art back in 2003? I'm using an 80 conductor IDE cable.

I have this problem under Win7RC1 also with an old 5224 Plextor. Try changing the read command to MMC1 under drive options in EAC. Don't know what disadvantages it has but it works.

Yes, that'll do the trick! Thanks a lot!
As long as the read command is recoginzed by the drive, I think there shouldn't be any real disadvantages. Our knowlegebase doesn't seem to know something about that topic...

One question stays: Is UDMA 2 mode the maximum of a Plextor Premium drive?

Litte update:

After I've bought an eSATA device were hotplugging didn't work, I did some research via google about that issue. The eSATA port is connected to the same Marvell chipset as the IDE port. The tip was to install special drivers for the Marvell controller, although Win7 seemed to recognize the controller without any drivers. Result: Hotplugging with eSATA works and as a "side effect", all the problems with my IDE devices are gone.

Maybe this might help others...

I've experienced the same problem with my (old but still living) Yamaha CRW-F1E and only with this drive.
Switching from D8 to MMC read command solved the issue.
To be mentioned too, ripping speed has increased a bit too in secure mode + cache enabled (about 10%)!
No problems with rips so far

For the record, the drive is hooked to an Intel ICH7 port. I didn't tried different drivers but the latest from Intel (as it comes in a full package with chipset drivers, I don't want to mess up the system).
I've tried different IDE configurations (Alone, Master, Slave, Cable Select), changing IDE cable, using ASPI layer, using another soundcard... I haven't tried the JMicron spare IDE port though.
The read command trick only did the job.

Using Windows 7 x64 RC here.
Maybe problem between Windows 7 and D8 read command?

Yes, quite likely. IIRC, UDMA mode 2 gives a transfer rate of 33 megabytes per second. There would have been no reason to equip the Premium with anything faster, as the drive's read rate is significantly slower than the interface. (The fastest I've ever seen is 72x which is 11 MB/sec).

I have the same problem on my Windows 7RC 32 bits. The Plextors PX-130A and PX-712A are on the same IDE cable connected to the jmicron chip on the AsusP5B. The PX-130A doesn't exihibit any problem with EAC v0.99prebeta5, in fact it is very good at ripping. The PX-712A works fine (reading and writing) except when extracting with EAC. The PC system stutters and ripping speed is low.

After seeing this thread and googling I've seen more people have this problem. Changing the D8 Read Command in EAC did not help. But, indeed, I had the jmicron in BIOS set to AHCI. I substituted the default Win7 drivers with the latest jmicron controller but the problem remained. For some others this was the solution. So I switched in motherboard BIOS the jmicron mode to IDE and the problem disappeared completely, and the ripping speed with the Plextor PX-712A is normal again.