Poor hard drive performance under Windows 2000

Helpline Q&A Directory

I recently built a new PC, which includes a 40GB Maxtor ATA 100 hard drive. The performance of my hard drive appeared to be poor, so I researched the UDMA support in Windows 2000 and found that it only supports UDMA 33.

I downloaded a Microsoft patch to remedy the problem, but apparently it requires a Registry change to enable full UDMA 100 support.

According to the information we found, Windows 2000 supports ATA 66 (UDMA 66) as standard. ATA 100 drives will be treated as if they were ATA 66. A fix to enable ATA 100 support, is available from www.microsoft.com/downloads/release.asp?releaseid=22161.

After it has been installed, you may notice the value PIO displayed on the Advanced settings tab for the drive in Device Manager. According to Microsoft KnowledgeBase article Q260233, this is an error in Windows 2000, and doesn't mean that the fix isn't working. See tip Where are Microsoft's knowledgebase articles?