On-board HPT366 Controller Issues

hyperspace · Post by **hyperspace** » Sat Feb 22, 2003 11:05 am

Many BP6ers feel that the High-Point Technology on-board high-speed Ultra ATA66 IDE controller, HPT366, should be ripped out by its silicon.

Others have run one or more hard drives from this one of the first of its kind on-board controllers. And, some boot from a SCSI or other 3rd-party controllers and use the hard drives on the HPT366 controller for data storage and/or pagefiles. Some hard drives work better than others. A few won't work at all. Make sure you use one of the RU BIOS revisions with the HPT366 BIOS version 1.25 or higher. Some of tried various combinations of different HPT366 driver revisions to get their hard drive to work properly. The HPT366 controller was not designed for Optical drives. Here's what the BP6 manual says:

The HPT366 IDE controller is designed to support high-speed mass storage. Thus, we don't suggest you connect non-disk devices that use ATA/ATAPI interfaces, such as CD-ROM to HPT366 IDE connector (IDE3 & IDE4).

Note: Overclocking the BP6 may contribute to problems related to the HPT366 controller. Never overclock your system while setting up hardware or installing the operating system. The HPT366 controller could cause data corruption or hard drive failure if your system is overclocked. That said, many BP6ers have overclocked systems using the HPT366 controller.

Here are some very important things to be aware of when trying to use the HPT366 controller:

Make sure the hard drive is set for ATA66 (UDMA 4) mode.
Your BIOS setting for the Boot Sequence must be set to EXT to boot from a hard drive on the HPT366 controller. Select the SCSI option under Boot Sequence EXT Means.
Make sure you using a 80-pin Ultra ATA66 cable with the blue connector plugged into the mainboard. The black connector is used for the master hard drive and the grey connector is used for the slave hard drive. The cable length should not exceed 18 inches.
Any PCI card plugged into PCI slot 3, must be able to share the IRQ that is also shared with the HPT366 controller. The HPT366 drivers are designed to share the IRQ with other device that are designed to do the same.

Many have used other controller cards like the ones from Promise. A few other 3rd-party controllers have been used but most are very satisfied with the Promise. They are several models with ATA/100 and ATA/133 speeds. SCSI controllers have been used in place of the HPT366 controller with very good results.

the_flames · Post by **the_flames** » Tue May 06, 2003 9:19 pm

To get my HDD's running on the ATA66 IDE controller, I had to set the ATA 100 drive to the top speed that's is capable, also using ATA33 cables enabled the drive to be used, but at a much slower rate (pio mode 4)

on the BX-133 raid (RIP, shouldnt of tryed that overclocking with duff powersupply) I had, the two disks I have had the same problems.

Meister · Post by **Meister** » Wed May 07, 2003 11:16 pm

I run both of my ATA-66 drives (1 WD & 1 Maxtor) off of the HPT-366 with no problems. When I first install the OS I run the boot drive off of the normal IDE controller then after the OS is up and the drivers are installed for the HPT-366 I shut the system down and move the cable over, change the BIOS, then boot. Works like a charm! I have done this with both W2k and XP for several years now with the RU & 1.25.

hyperspace · Post by **hyperspace** » Thu May 08, 2003 6:56 am

I do a similar process on my BP6 systems. Many have used your method to get hard drives functioning on the HPT366 controller. I have used SCSI for years on all systems I build. Install OS to SCSI. Once in the OS, I install the HPT366 drivers. After the reboot, the hard drive(s) connected to the HPT366 are ready for business.

Post by **Derek** » Mon Jun 02, 2003 6:10 pm

raw_spider wrote:i've had some serious problems on running hpt366 controler and barracuda IV 40GB drive ... i couldn't force linux / xp to boot from harddrive... the only response i got was noisy sound generated by hdd heads... fortunatly highpoint support helped me out by sending unreleased / unofficial bios/xp drivers 1.30b...... after merging it with bp6 etc etc ;it WORKED... still , i've got some nasty messages during kernel boot-up (interrupts , dma , crc errors) but at least hpt366 recognizes my harddrive properly .... questions
1) is this bios more "stable" than previous releases ? worth upgrading?
2) why the performance of hpt366 is so looooow........after"hdparm -t /dev/hde" i'm getting a little over 18mb/s ..... and HDTach (winXP) results are even worse.... avarage read speed about 10mb/s.... 440bx chipset can do much better. is this a special case of hardware setup (barracuda IV + hpt366) or it's because of a shitty-design of IC (hpt366) ?? evil

sh*tty-design

If the setup if working do not upgrade the drivers, it's a once in a lifetime thing to have the HPT working in harmony with your computer

Wolfram · Post by **Wolfram** » Tue Jun 03, 2003 7:43 am

raw_spider wrote:2) why the performance of hpt366 is so looooow........after"hdparm -t /dev/hde" i'm getting a little over 18mb/s ..... and HDTach (winXP) results are even worse.... avarage read speed about 10mb/s.... 440bx chipset can do much better. is this a special case of hardware setup (barracuda IV + hpt366) or it's because of a shitty-design of IC (hpt366) ??

I get 23 to 48 MB/s (average 33) with HDTach under Win2K SP3 with my Fujitsu MPG 3409 AH-EF (7.200rpm) on the HPT366. That drive should be slightly slower than the Barracuda IV according to www.storagereview.com.

The drive was much slower on the standard IDE ports (about 25 MB/s maxiumum). Can´t remember if there´s a difference in access times.

Looks like I´m one of the lucky few when it comes to the HPT366:)

baaden · Post by **baaden** » Tue Aug 17, 2004 5:11 am

Hi Folks,
I observe some similar problems with my HPT366 under linux. But I think I know what's going on, I just don4t understand it.
I have the latest 128 bios and it is set to UDMA 4 for the harddisk. Interestingly linux sees the BIOS setting for this HPT366 connected harddrive as pio and *not* DMA ! But why .. ? Any

purrkur · Post by **purrkur** » Sat Aug 21, 2004 5:17 am

baaden wrote:Hi Folks,
I observe some similar problems with my HPT366 under linux. But I think I know what's going on, I just don4t understand it.
I have the latest 128 bios and it is set to UDMA 4 for the harddisk. Interestingly linux sees the BIOS setting for this HPT366 connected harddrive as pio and *not* DMA ! But why .. ? Any

Hello Baaden,

How do you know that you are only getting pio and not DMA?? What kernel and distro are you using? What harddrive are you using?

Could you please attach the output from the following commands (needs to be run as root):

hdparm -I /dev/hda
hdparm /dev/hda

Replace hda with the device number of the harddrive attached to the HTP366!

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