Hi, first time poster. I signed up here to see if anyone here could help me out.

I looked on Google and on here. Plus I already read the IDE controllers thread.

My problem is: when transfering large files or using bandwidth heavy files (such as videos) the cpu usage alone is 10-30% on top of what I'm doing. (I compaired the same video on two different drives, one on my SATA drive and one on a IDE drive)

My question is that am I simply alone in this? Has anyone else experienced this and has anyone managed to fix this? I've seen stuff online alluding to this but never with an ending or solution. Right now this problem if pushed enough could cause the computer to stall for a second or more...

Here are some stats if you need them:
Windows XP SP2

SIIG UltraATA 133 PCI (Version 3; Sil680 Revision 2 chipset; Sil680ACL144; BIOS 3.0.93)
Using the latest drivers from SIIG (which are the same as Silicon Image drivers)

Pentium D 830 (3ghz)
Intel 945G Chipset (card interacts with the mb bios nicely, can boot from drives on that card)


So any clues

How are the drives connected/installed, maybe using RAID?

No RAID, this model is just plain IDE. One channel has two drives connected (was CS/CS, now M/S) to it and the other channel one just one drive (WD drive in single mode; was Master but refused to boot with that) (3 drives total)

This is pretty common with PCI-based controllers. No, there's nothing you can do about it. You could switch to a different controller, but you're not going to eliminate it.

10% is about right, 30% is a little high, which slot is the card in?

Its in the second slot of the available PCI slots. There are five total: PCI-Express 16x, PCI0, PCI1, PCI-Express 1x (Don't remember the extact speed), PCI2. In each are: Graphics card, 10/100 Network card, the IDE controller, empty, and finally the TV-Tuner card.

what's the irq assignment in device manager? especially what is it sharing with?

Hum.. The controller was sharing with the "Microsoft UAA Bus Driver for High Definition Audio" on IRQ 22. That may be what was causing the high CPU issue when using anything the needs audio. I moved it up one slot and now it is alone on IRQ 21. I'll see how this works out...

update

I've been messing around with it some more, monitoring any changes. So far when it comes to reading files moving it to a seperate slot helped a lot. But, when it comes to writing files it still takes 10-30% of my CPU. Though the difference with that now is instead of a soild 10-30% it fluctuates.

I'm guessing this is about as good as it gets no?

probably but I had a sil chipset asus mobo, that the sil driver still listed on the web
was crap/ even people saying the hardware was no good, it took sil 2 years to get
it together, I tested it after a clean install, shrink took a 4.4 gig file from one hard drive
and made an iso in 2 minutes on another hard drive.