well, the most popular SATA controller right now is the Silicon Image 3112. It has stability and data loss issues, so it is no surpise the sata drive is unstable. Other chips include promise and highpoint. They are all PCI based, so your system is choking trying to run 2 hard drive controllers off a shared 133MB/s bus...plus the audigy takes lots of bus time, too.

EDIT: I see you have fasttrak drivers...that means you have promise. Try turning on/off drive caching in the fasttrak app.

Also, in most cases, network controllers run on PCI even though they are integrated to the board.

There are SATA controllers in the new bridge chips by Intel and Via, but these will only be in spanking-new, higher end systems (and if you have a Celeron you don't have either).

I see you are running a CDR and a DVDR. You should replace the CDR with the DVD-rom...having a cdr and dvdr is redundant. That is the best solution.

 

okay, so i've given it some thought and i've decided that i need to make some adjustments/rearrangement to my system. i am not happy with the instability and lag of my current setup. just in case it matters, i have P4 2.53GHz with 1G of DDR ram. my goal for my system is optimal performance and stability, first and foremost. so between the dvd-rom and cdr, i would be more willing to part with the dvd-rom mainly for the reason that my dvdr, for some reason, allows max cd burning speed at 16x, whereas my cdr can burn at 48x. so since i do burn a lot of CDs, i would appreciate the 48x speed. so i guess what this means is that i will pull out the ultra66 card after all. the other factor i need to decide on is the HD situation. currently i have two 80G IDE HDs (one that's ata133 and the other ata100) that i use for backup. i also have a 160G SATA HD that i am currently booting off of. the SATA controller is made by Promise. steven975 mentioned that there are stability/reliability issues with the silicon image chip, but i was wondering if these issues also apply to the promise chip. if so, would i be better off ditching the SATA drive and replace it with an ata133 IDE drive?? i have the luxury of trading my HDs at my brothers work, so if it would benefit my system's performance and stability, i can ideally swap my SATA 160G and my two IDE 80G drives for two 160G ATA133 IDE drives. so ultimately, i need advice as to the best way to cable all these components together. again, steven975 mentioned that the SATA drives are sharing bandwidth with the other PCI ports, so i was wondering if the IDE ports are also sharing that same bandwidth. if the SATA port IS sharing bandwidth with the PCI ports, is the port still capable of achieving 150Mb/s transfer speed?? lastly, do my 2 IDE HDs need to be connected to the same IDE cable, or would it be more advantageous, if i connect one HD to master PRI_IDE and the other the to master SEC_IDE, and connecting my CDR and DVDR to the slave PRI_IDE and SEC_IDE, respectively??

 

also, how do you guys feel about running 2 SATA HDs, but not running in either RAID 0 or 1 configuration?? although i know i am using one of the HD for backup, i do not exactly want to do a RAID 0 setup because i do not want the 2 drives to be EXACT copies of each other cuz just in case i get a virus or screw up somehow, i would not want both drives affected. instead, i want to control both drives seperately and independently.

 

the promise chip is PCI, thus it shares the 133MB/s with your audigy and network. Since PCI is 133MB/s max, the SATA theoretical transfer of 150MB/s (it's really 1.5Gbps, or 187.5MB/s) could never be achieved.

The IDE drives are not PCI...they used to be but now IDE is run from the chipset. Newer SATA controllers from Via, Nvidia, and Intel are also run from the chipset.

Running both drives on the same cable is fine.

The promise chip is the most stable, but they are really designed for RAID arrays. They are often problematic if you try to run just one drive or drives that are NOT in RAID.