A site dedicated to the Knoop family name.
During the Christmas holidays we visited friends on Bowen, a small and charming island near Vancouver.
We also had wind storms and lots of snow in December, causing power outages, school closures, and general mayhem in what is usually a temperate cllimate. – Leslie
Since posting about my (bad) experiences with Maxtor SATA-II drives on an Asus A8R-MVP, I have received comments from a few people that were experiencing the same problem. I am glad that my post helped and recently had another experience which I would like to share.
A neighbour and good friend of mine had been in the dark ages as far as home computing goes. Household computing power consisted of a calculator, a cell phone and I think I saw an abacus in his family room, but I digress. 
With a budget of C$2,000, I set out to build a Media Center PC for him. The PC would run Windows XP, use his existing ~32″ television and allow him to digitally record television (2 different channels simultaneously), listen to the radio, consolidate his music library, surf the Internet, burn DVDs and store all the family pictures from his digital camera. The following system was ordered:
A local vendor was able to provide all the parts, minus the speakers and the Hauppage TV tuner. With all parts acquired, I set out to install the tuner and configure the system. After installing the WinTV card, I booted the system but nothing happened. The PC would not even POST or display anything on the screen. I proceeded to try every other PCI slot on the motherboard and experimented with manual IRQ settings. The PC would not boot with the WinTV card installed.
Some surfing revealed another person that had the same problem. The trick was to disable the onboard SI3114 RAID controller in the BIOS. This particular MSI motherboard has *two* onboard RAID controllers – the SI3114 and a nForce which was used to mirror the 300GB drives. It turns out that the WinTV PVR-500MCE uses two IRQs (probably because it has two tuners), and this conflicted in some way with the SI3114 controller.
A 10 second fix to a frustrating problem that was not documented on Hauppauge’s or MSI’s website.
../mk
While this is not a Knoop related post, I recently experienced some grief in building a new PC and thought I’d give back by sharing the details.
In building a new PC, I wanted a higher level of disk redundancy so I purchased 2 300GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10′s with an Asus A8R-MVP motherboard which features onboard RAID. My plan was to mirror the two. Both the motherboard and drives were labeled as “SATA-II” (also referred to as SATA/300) compatible.
After assembling the parts, I enabled the RAID BIOS and proceeded to configure my RAID array – upon committing to the creation of the array, my PC hung and the settings were not saved when rebooting. The other interesting side effect was that when booting, the PC would spend 3-5 minutes “Detecting IDE Drives…” before trying to boot an OS. I tried changing cables and tried different SATA ports on the A8R-MVP. Same problem.
Frustated, I decided to disable the RAID BIOS to see if the drives worked as regular standalone drives and they worked well. Windoze XP installed without issues and the 3-5 minute boot delay disappeared. Feeling confident that the problem was with the motherboard, I proceeded to upgrade the BIOS to the most current version and tried enabling RAID again – no dice.
Several websites pointed out that Maxtor SATA II drives had compatibility issues with motherboards that used the Nvidia chipsets – my Asus used a Crossfire chipset. I then came across an interesting post on dfi-street.com . People with Nvidia powered motherboards were reporting freezing and disappearing Maxtor DiamondMax drives. One fellow quoted some interesting information:
"the problem you are having has nothing to do with drivers or the board, you, as well as MANY others, fell for Maxtor's false advertising. Maxtor claims that because the DM10/Maxline3 drives are native SATA and support NCQ, that they are somehow SATA2 drives. None of the Maxtor drives support the SATA300 speed, they are the only company that doesn't support it right now, yet they still claim that their drives are SATA2. I guess the only way they can get away with saying that is because they support the NCQ feature, but it is not mandatory in the SATA2 spec, just like the SATA1 spec, so I have no clue what part of the drive is SATA2. I think that currently, the worst hard drives you can get are the Maxtor DM10/Maxline3 drives because they have massive incompatibilities with all drive controllers (firmware updates are required most of the time to get the drive working at all, trust me, I've had to deal with this problem WAY too much) and because they falsely advertise SATA2, which confuses people."
With both Maxtor DiamondMax 10′s in hand, I drove to the store and exchanged them for a pair of Seagate Barracudas. It had the same specifications as the DiamondMax’s, but came at a C$50 premium. In to my PC they went with RAID BIOS enabled and the Barracudas worked flawlessly as a mirrored array! The PC booted up within seconds and performance was great.
The Maxtors were DiamondMax 10′s – 6V300F0. 300GB drives, 7200rpm, 16MB cache.
I hope this post helps someone, somewhere! Maxtor drives are now with Western Digital on my “do not buy list”.
Marc Knoop
I found this on one of the 2×8′s in the basement – does it have any meaning? It seems to have been written using a common marker. Is this a result of boredom? Is it voodoo?!?
Does anyone know what it means?
While not record breaking, the 2004/2005 winter was rather chilly. This was backed up by several evenings where the beer actually froze before the bottle had been finished. Guess I wasn’t drinking quickly enough! Below’s pic is courtesy of my car on a balmy January morning.
Now a July evening where it was even warmer with the humidex factor…
../mk
