Is ATA100 worth having?

[Guest]

I heard a rumour that full use of the ATA100 drives could not be made due to a bus bottleneck. Is this just a rumour, even with ATA 100 motherboards?

If this is a rumour, is there a 50% improvement with ATA 100 over ATA 66?

 

[Guest]

I have the same question. Is it worth having for the next 2-3 years?

 

[Guest]

no, the bus is not the problem. PCI bus can handle up to 130MB/s or more or something like that. Tom has an article in the harddrive section on ATA drives.

The drives only come close to their potentail 100 in a sequential write, something like capturing a video stream from your camcorder. The rest is slower, much slower.

You have to have an ATA100 supported mobo, just in case you did not know that.

Take care.

 

[Guest]

I'd might worth it for the next few years, but new standards will probably be established then. Like it was said before, there isn't much of an increase when you switch to ATA/100.

The bottleneck here is the Hard disk. The fastest IDE hard disk cannot reach a burst read peak of 60mb/s, for now. So the ATA/100 is sort of overkill. Though, I believe that 60mb/s is pretty close to the limit offered by UDMA/66 (66mb/s), so we'll probably see a use for ATA/100 pretty soon. But, do not expect a 50% increase of data transfer rate.

 

[SoulReaper]

From what i hear ATA/100 doesn't have a significant performance increase over ATA/66. This is why i stay with my SCSI drives. Plus SCSI is better for multi-tasking

"Upgrading is no longer an option....it's a necessity"
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--SoulReaper =)

 

[Guest]

I wouldn't say there was a 50% improvement, but there is definately an improvement! The problem with IDE drives is that they have a large processing overhead (SCSI gets over this by having better controller cards), so you loose a huge chunk of bandwidth.

So even though the drives themselves can't transfer at 100Mb/s the ATA100 standard means that the drives do nearly reach there peak transfer rates. Where as ATA66 is limited by bandwidth.

For the ultimate IDE performance get a Promise Raid card and two UDMA100 hard disks