irkregent Posted June 24, 2003 Share Posted June 24, 2003 I just bought a new hard disk, this one a Maxtor rated for ATA/133. My current disk drive is an IBM rated at ATA/66. Both spin at 7200 RPM. I have not been able to determine the supported speed of my machine's IDE port, but I'm assuming it is also ATA/66. (It's a Del XPS B-series, but the otherwise comprehensive on-line documentation does not seem to contain this spec.)I haven't decided yet whether to keep both drives in place or just use the new one. If I keep both in use, I understand I may gain a little speed by placing the Windows (2000 Pro, SP3) swap file on the second physical disk.So my question is this: Will it be worthwhile for me to get an ATA/133 card to use as the interface for this new drive? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GolfProRM Posted June 24, 2003 Share Posted June 24, 2003 You will notice quite a bit of difference between ATA-66 and ATA-133... I would definitely add the card if your MB is only ATA66... If your MB supports ATA-100, I wouldn't say the upgrade is worth it, but if not, definitely upgrade! Your whole OS will run faster, and file transfers will be very slick...I will say though, if you buy the ATA-133 card, keep your swapfile on the new drive as you'll lose benefit of moving it if it's on a slower drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marsden11 Posted June 24, 2003 Share Posted June 24, 2003 Just remember not to put them on the same IDE channel. Your new drive would automatically default to the lowest speed of the old drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peachy Posted June 24, 2003 Share Posted June 24, 2003 Just remember not to put them on the same IDE channel. Your new drive would automatically default to the lowest speed of the old drive.Hmm,this is a controversial subject because, I tend to agree with those who say that's a big myth. A single ATA controller can support two independent channels so, really, each device will work at its rated bandwidth. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marsden11 Posted June 24, 2003 Share Posted June 24, 2003 Myth my ass! If you stick a ATA-66 on Primary channel 1 as HD0 and a second drive which is ATA133 on that same channel as HD1; there is no way in **** you are going to get rated speeds out of both drives simultaneously.Are you assuming that the MB can support ATA133 or LBA? Or that support for HDs over 137GB is not available until XP SP1? IDE is not smart enough to handle two seperate bus speeds. Why do you think ATA100, and 133 requires a 80 conductor cable? Its a different spec. Sure the older HDs are compatable, but at a price. In this case performance. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rick5127 Posted June 24, 2003 Share Posted June 24, 2003 Two drives different speeds on the same IDE channel. This definitely will slow to the lowest speed... regardless if you are reading and writing to both.Now to the real world test. I had two hard drives (both 100's) on the same IDE channel. I was trying to do a backup and was getting pretty slow transfer times from one drive to the other. I am afraid I didnt keep a record of the numbers but trust me they were slow.So I moved the spare drive to the other IDE channel where there was a CD drive and left the CD the master. I still got slow transfer times. So I reversed it and made the drive the Master and the CD drive the slave. Same result very slow transfer. Then I removed the CD drive just as a test. Immediately the times almost doubled. SO...My indications are that any time you have two devices on one IDE channel the channel slows to the slowest device. And if you are using two devices at the same time on one IDE channel.. they seem to fight for the channel and slow each other down.So... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest genaldar Posted June 25, 2003 Share Posted June 25, 2003 I'd say don't bother buying the card. My mobo only supports ata33 and it runs fine. My hard drive is an ata100 and ever since I bought it I've thought of getting a card. A couple of months ago, when I was upgrading parts of my system, I again thought about buying an add in card. Then I ran some benchmarks. In Sandra my hard drive performed as well as many of my friends newer systems. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GolfProRM Posted June 25, 2003 Share Posted June 25, 2003 My first-hand experience comes from adding an older (ATA-66) harddrive to my machine to run Linux. I had it set as Primary slave (under my ATA-100 drive)... Not even using the main drive at the time (it had Windows), Linux ran very slowly... I tried moving the second drive to the Secondary IDE, but that didn't help. All along I never noticed a difference when running Windows. I decided to partition off a chunk of my big drive and use it in combination with the second drive to run Linux (putting the root and swap on the ATA-100). Put the second drive back as Primary slave, and it ran beautifully. Ended up dumping the second drive and buying a bigger one... Both ATA-100 connected to the Primary IDE, and I never notice slow copy times between the two... It may be a small performance hit, but shouldn't be a huge one (unless all you're doing is copying back and forth).We need to make sure we're discussing the topics at hand and not targeting different members. Also, please keep the language clean. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peachy Posted June 25, 2003 Share Posted June 25, 2003 Myth my ass! If you stick a ATA-66 on Primary channel 1 as HD0 and a second drive which is ATA133 on that same channel as HD1; there is no way in **** you are going to get rated speeds out of both drives simultaneously.Are you assuming that the MB can support ATA133 or LBA? Or that support for HDs over 137GB is not available until XP SP1? IDE is not smart enough to handle two seperate bus speeds. Why do you think ATA100, and 133 requires a 80 conductor cable? Its a different spec. Sure the older HDs are compatable, but at a price. In this case performance.Okay,Maybe myth was the wrong word to use. What I was ultimately getting at is this: at one point in the development of the ATA standard this situation was true, particularly when drives were only capable of PIO mode transfer rates. However, with the newer standards, ATA controllers should be capable of independent device timing. What I interpret this to mean is that on an ATA channel that is capable of supporting Ultra DMA then each device should be able to use the bus at its nominal transfer speed. For example, say you have an ATA bus that is capable of Ultra DMA/100 then if you put an ATA33 drive and an ATA100 drive on the same channel, each device would communicate with the bus at its maximum transfer speed. This doesn't negate the fact that each device can only communicate with the bus by itself and can't share it simultaneously; that's a different issue. In this case, if the bus is busy, the other device must wait for the first device to finish its transfer before it can proceed and that's where you will see some bottlenecks. But it's obvious that if you put a ATA133 drive on an ATA33 bus, then the drive will have a maximum transfer rate of 33 Mbps. But it's not the case that if you put an ATA33 drive and an ATA133 drive on an ATA133/100 controller that the ATA133 drive will transfer only at 33 Mbps. Because of independent device timing and busmastering, the ATA133 drive will transfer at 133 Mbps or 100 Mbps. So getting back to the example in question, then, the ATA133 drive on the ATA66 bus will max out at 66 Mbps. Maybe I'm just nitpicking or being semantic but I was hoping to dispell what I perceived as a false assumption. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest LilBambi Posted June 25, 2003 Share Posted June 25, 2003 Doesn't this issue come up more if you put, say (for argument's sake), an ATA/66 and an ATA/133 drive on the same channel (cable) ... given that the MB can in fact handle ATA/133?I understood that between channels, it wasn't as big a deal, unless the MB itself is limited to say, ATA/66.??? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Prelude76 Posted June 25, 2003 Share Posted June 25, 2003 I'd say don't bother buying the card. My mobo only supports ata33 and it runs fine. My hard drive is an ata100 and ever since I bought it I've thought of getting a card. A couple of months ago, when I was upgrading parts of my system, I again thought about buying an add in card. Then I ran some benchmarks. In Sandra my hard drive performed as well as many of my friends newer systems.i agree. save the money and get a new MOBO in future that supports ATA 133 or 200 or 266 or whatever is newest and greatest. these add-on serial cards aren't worth the slight performance increase, IMO. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
irkregent Posted June 25, 2003 Author Share Posted June 25, 2003 I'd say don't bother buying the card...Oops -- my card is on the way. Fortunately, I didn't spend much for it.The new drive performs quite well attached to the ATA/66 port on the motherboard. According to PCpitstop.com's tests, cached performance is up to 158 MB/sec (versus 126 for the old drive), while uncached speed is way up, 5.83 MB/sec versus 1.62.When I get the ATA/133 card I'll do some real world tests and report the results here. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gus K Posted June 26, 2003 Share Posted June 26, 2003 You will notice quite a bit of difference between ATA-66 and ATA-133.I don't think so. I haven't seen one test where a HD has exceeded the ATA66 spec. ATA100 and ATA133 drives may be faster, but that is because of newer technology. It has nothing to do with ATA66 vs ATA133 controller. My ATA133 Maxtor 80g on a ATA133 mobo is slower than my ATA100 WD 40g drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FuzzButt Posted June 30, 2003 Share Posted June 30, 2003 Gus,What is your PC used for? unless you are doing large sequential file reads of massive MPG's I doubt that you will have much real world speed increase with the ATA133. Here is your problem. With ATA133 the drives to host adapter speed is 133MB/s but internal drive speeds are variable depending on what data it is accessing and wether it is writing or reading. the ATA100 will be a bit slower but depending on the data and what is going on with the rest of the PC it might be the same speed. See unless you are using one of the very latest PC's your PCI Bus is now your limiting factor. It can only move 133MB/s or so with the signaling overhead and such.This might not really matter much and the prices of the ATA133 cards are not that high. I have the Siig ATA133 card in my PC and the Promise Ultra100TX2 in my other PC. The Promise is replacing the mobo's ATA33 Primary and Secondary ATA connections so my hard drives are connected to that card instead of the mobo. I would make sure that when you put it in your PC you connect like drives on the same cable. if you are running a 100 and a 133 on the same cable and have the other channel empty then there is no reason that they both can't be on seperate channels. Also if you were thinking about putting the hard drive taht has Windows 2000 or XP on it on the new adapter you can forget it. windows needs to be re-installed to get the low-level drivers installed so it will work. I tried this and the PC will BSD before it boots. So make a good backup of everything and then connect the drives to the new card and boot to the W2K or WinXP CD and find that floppy that came with the adapter. When the installation console is comming up hit "F6" to install a third party driver. I would choose the install new option and do a quick NTFS format. You will end up with a faster clean installation. A good starting place. Chris Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peachy Posted July 3, 2003 Share Posted July 3, 2003 Out of curiosity I wanted to see for myself some numbers to validate my contention that sticking an ATA66 drive and an ATA33 drive on the same ATA33 controller would not adversely affect the performance of the faster drive.HardwareMobo: Shuttle HOT-591P Socket 7 with VIA VT82C586B South Bridge chip (ATA/33 UDMA 2)CPU: AMD K6-2 450OS: Windows 95B and Windows 98SEDrive 1: Western Digital WD153AA ATA/66 UDMA 4 (15.3 GB)Drive 2: Fujitsu MPC3043AT ATA/33 UDMA 2 (4.3 GB)VIA Hyperion 4-in-1 busmaster drivers version 4.46 (DMA mode enabled)Benchmark scores were read tests from Testalabs HDTach 2.61N.B. performance differences were neglible between OSes and whether or not the drive was master or slave when both drives were attached. Also, the VIA drivers gave about a 1% performance increase over Windows' native busmaster DMA mode.Drives were attached first as single master on primary controller.FujitsuAccess time: 15.2 msRead Burst: 20.3 mbpsRead Speed:max: 12,495.0 kpsmin: 8,437.0 kpsavg: 11,266.5 kpsCPU utilization: 3.3%Western DigitalAccess time: 10.1 msRead Burst: 26 mbpsRead Speed:max: 24,908.0 kpsmin: 11,973.0 kpsavg: 23,264.0 kpsCPU utilization: 7.9%Drives on the same primary controller.FujitsuAccess time: 14.9 msRead Burst: 20.9 mbpsRead Speed:max: 12,596.0 kpsmin: 8,431.0 kpsavg: 11,274.3 kpsCPU utilization: 3.6%Western DigitalAccess time: 10.3 msRead Burst: 26 mbpsRead Speed:max: 24,970.0 kpsmin: 19,120.0 kpsavg: 24,077.8 kpsCPU utilization: 8.6%My conclusion? It doesn't make a difference. The faster drive does not slow down because it is sharing the bus with the slower drive. In fact, performance increased slightly for both drives. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest LilBambi Posted July 3, 2003 Share Posted July 3, 2003 Thanks Peachy!That's great news! Wonder when that started being the case? I know with old 33/66 it did seem to make a difference if they were on the same IDE channel (cable). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gus K Posted July 3, 2003 Share Posted July 3, 2003 Well VIA notes that putting PIO and UDMA devices on the same channel may impact performance. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bigd Posted July 4, 2003 Share Posted July 4, 2003 Iwould agree with Peachy about speed contention (none), however, the point is moot if you buy a ATA133 card. Until serial ATA becomes a standard, you can't have more than 4 drives anyway. I have a ATA133 hard drive on one port of the card. A ATA100 on the other port. Each of my CD's gets a seperate port on the mother board. Life is good. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FuzzButt Posted July 4, 2003 Share Posted July 4, 2003 Those are interesting findings. Thanks for sharing. I wonder how much hooking up ATA CDROM's and other non-hard drives does to the transfer speeds? I do know that access to both devices at the same time will suffer but not by how much. Try to access your DVD drive when you are burning a CDR. If it was not for the Buffer underrun protection you would have a coaster.Chris Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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