You will definitely get a noticeable speed increase.
There are three main factors limiting your drive performance:
1) Interface Speed
I am assuming your old WD is an ATA/33 or ATA/66, providing a maximum transfer rate of 33Mbps or 66Mbps, respectively. Going to ATA/100 will of course raise your maximum transfer rate, but this may have little impact on your overall effective drive performance (I will explain why below).
There are two requirements for using ATA/100:
a) Your motherboard needs to support it. If it doesn't, your drive will run at whatever ATA rate it supports. You can purchase a separate IDE controller to fit in one of your motherboard's PCI slots if you need to.
b) As with ATA/66, you need to use an 80-conductor ribbon to connect your drive to the motherboard/controller (not the old-style 40-conductor). If you use a 40-conductor ribbon, your drive will run at ATA/33.
(note: ATA modes are backwards compatible. You can safely run an ATA/100 drive on an ATA/33 system - it will just run slower.)
The interface rate represents the maximum data rate for *cached* data. I will explain the difference in performance between cached and uncached data below. In any case, this factor will NOT account for a large fraction of your speed increase.
2) Average Seek Time
I don't know what kind of seek time your old drive has, but it's probably not as good as the seek on your new Maxtor. I don't know for certain, but I would imagine that you will probably get a 3-5% speed increase from this alone. This really depends on the specific numbers for each drive and the type of applications you run. Going from 9.5ms to 8.9ms will make a difference. Any decrease in seek time is good.
3) Spindle Speed
Whereas the interface speed indicates the maximum possible data rate over the IDE bus, the spindle speed indicates the maximum mechanical velocity of the drive platters. With a 5400 RPM drive, the platters cannot spin fast enough to saturate the IDE bus. Thus, for uncached data (which requires reading directly from the platter), the spindle speed becomes the bottleneck.
Spindle speed (in conjunction with other factors) represents the data rate of uncached data. Moving up to 7200RPMs will probably give you the most noticeable increase in speed.
Cached vs. Uncached
When an application requests many consecutive strings of data, a hard drive would normally need to seek to the requested position and read the data from the medium for each request. In order to boost performance in these situations, they add cache memory to the hard drive controller, so that an entire block of data (e.g. 2MB) is read with the first request and held on to for later requests. Thus, at each subsequent request, the drive simply retrieves the requested data from cache memory, which will be orders of magnitude faster than the amount of time it takes to mechanically actuate the drive head and wait for the rotational latency of the platter.
Because the cache is so small compared to the size of the whole drive, cached-reads will only occur a very small percentage of the time. Thus, an ATA/100 drive is only transferring at 100Mbps a fraction of the time. The larger the cache memory, the more data will be read from the cache in any given span of time, and therefore, drive performance will increase. Many larger drives (80GB and up) come in versions that have 8MB cache. Still, the drive is mostly limited by the spindle speed.
Because cache memory needs to be quick, it is very expensive. Therefore, you will pay more for a drive with an 8MB cache than one with a 2MB cache. I am not aware of any IDE drives with a cache larger than 8MB. This is probably because the cost/benefit ratio quickly drops, and it is not profitable for the manufacturer to increase cache size beyond 8MB. There are probably also logistical considerations involving the rotational speed, byte/sector/track densities, and seek times, that affect the amount of performance gain provided by a larger cache.
The most notable time that uncached performance manifests is during boot and application start. Seek time and spindle speed will have the most effect on boot times for your system and applications.
In summary, even if your motherboard is old, you should see a performance increase due to the better seek time and spindle speed. If you desire further gains, consider upgrading your motherboard to something that supports ATA/66 or higher, or consider purchasing a dedicated IDE controller.
Hope this helps
-DOOM
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