Could my MaxTransfer rate be too high? What should it be?
A. My initial reaction to questions about MaxTransfer is usually a shout of “Bite me! Arrrrrggggh!” This usually frightens off everyone except the really serious. MaxTransfer has almost nothing to do with transfer rates. It sets the Maximum Transfer SIZE, and is needed to deal with many IDE drives that are built assuming that they’ll be used only in rock-stupid PC hardware. If a transfer larger than this size (usually 128K) is requested, the drive will garble some data. Setting MaxTransfer to 0x1FE00 for each partition will force large transfers to be broken into 128K sections, avoiding the IDE bug. Very old drives might need a setting of 0xFE00. MaxTransfer is almost never an issue with SCSI drives, and you can usually set it to arbitrarily large values (HDToolBox defaults to 0x7FFFFFFF). For more details on MaxTransfer, see the A1200 Hardware FAQ.
A. My initial reaction to questions about MaxTransfer is usually a shout of “Bite me! Arrrrrggggh!” This usually frightens off everyone except the really serious. MaxTransfer has almost nothing to do with transfer rates. It sets the Maximum Transfer SIZE, and is needed to deal with many IDE drives that are built assuming that they’ll be used only in rock-stupid PC hardware. If a transfer larger than this size (usually 128K) is requested, the drive will garble some data. Setting MaxTransfer to 0x1FE00 for each partition will force large transfers to be broken into 128K sections, avoiding the IDE bug. Very old drives might need a setting of 0xFE00. MaxTransfer is almost never an issue with SCSI drives, and you can usually set it to arbitrarily large values (HDToolBox defaults to 0x7FFFFFFF). For more details on MaxTransfer, see the >A1200 Hardware FAQ.
