ATA66 versus ATA100

[agriffin]

OK I know the obvious answer is that the data speeds are faster for ATA 100. My question is more centered around what the motherboard can actually utilize. I've heard that the current consumer MB's on the market running at 133mhz don't even have the bandwidth to support ATA66 let alone ATA100. Just wondering if any of you here have heard that or found tha switching to ATA100 from ATA66 hasnt given you that much of a performance boost?

 

[silverpig]

Motherboards have no problem with ATA100. The bandwidth of the PCI bus (ie hard drive bandwidth on the motherboard) is 133MB/s so ATA100 is getting close to, but hasn't reached, the max of most motherboards. The real limiting factor with ATA100 drives is the drives themselves. Even the fastest IDE drives (7200 rpm IBMs are pretty quick) can transfer data in a continuous stream at about 35-40 MB/s. Whether it's ATA66 or ATA100 it won't matter. The only time there's a difference is in bursting transfers from the hard drive's SDRAM cache. In this case the ATA100 drives will transfer data at almost 100 MB/s and the ATA66 drives will transfer at almost 66 MB/s. But then again, a large cache is 2MB so you'll "notice" the difference in performance for maybe a 50th of a second...

Summary:
ATA66 to ATA100 not a big performance gain. Not limited by motherboards, but by reading speed of hard drives.

Solution:
To get better performance, go for a 7200 rpm drive.

 

[Guest]

To compare, my second HD is a 40.0 GB Maxtor (7200RPM, ATA-66). My mobo only supported Ultra DMA-33. To be honest, the 40 gigger unpartitioned performs faster than a 3 gig partition on my original HD (13.6 GB IBM, 5400RPM, UDMA-33).

I am glad that I waited for the 7200 RPM model to come out.

Amish

Be careful among the English, you hear?

 

[agriffin]

Excellent, you guys gave me exactly what I needed to know. Thanks for the help!