[RESOLVED] ATA 100 vs. ATA 66 - My Opinion

[SkyGeek]

I purchased and installed a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus [40] 30.7G Ultra ATA 100 (53073H6) HD on my machine about a month ago. Surprisingly, I did not notice any significant improvement in performance over my previous HD, which was a Maxtor D.Plus 13.6G (7200-ATA66) HD.

The only real noticable difference was the whisper quiet operation of the new drive. Eventually I learned about Maxtor's Acoustic Management and how it actually slows the HDD down to allow a quieter operation. AMSET, a Maxtor utility (http://www.maxtor.com/Softwaredownload/default.htm), allows the end user to disable Acoustic Management so that the disk can perform as it was intended. The downside is that by disabling AM, it increases the disk noise. I, like many of you reading this, want performance and I really don't care about the slightly louder operation of the drive as a result of disabling Acoustic Management.

AMSET improved the benchmark results in Sisoft SANDRA. Average access time with A.M. disabled is now 8 ms. Access time was 10 ms prior to running the utility. If anyone wants me to post all info. that SANDRA outputs after the HD benchmark, I'd be happy to.

Anyway, my first upgrade (from 6.4G ATA33 to 13.6G-ATA66 HD) resulted in a remarkable difference in disk performance. A friend of mine agreed that it made a big difference in overall disk performance to his machine when he followed suit.

I assumed that the ATA100 HD would have an equally noticable impact on my machine, as did the 33 to 66. My motherboard was ATA100 ready so I was really looking forward to similar results. Wrong! What a disappointment. A colleague of mine said that he never noticed much of a difference when he upgraded to ATA100 either. So if you are thinking about an upgrade, I would advise that you stay with your ATA66 until you actually need more space and have to buy a new disk anyway.

Here are my system specs:

ASUS CUSL2 (UDMA MODE 5 - ATA100 M/Board - BIOS Rev. 1006)
P3 800EB
256MB PC133 SDRAM (1 x Micron running @ 2T,2T,2T / 7T,9T)
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 30.7G ATA 100 HD
ASUS CD-S500 50x Max CD-ROM
Sony CD-RW CRX140E Burner (8x4x32)
SB Live! Platinum 5.1 Sound Card
Cambridge Soundworks DTT2200 Speakers
Canon N650U (USB) Scanner
Canon BJC6000 Parallel Printer
17" MAG Innovision 770T (Trinitron)
Voodoo 3 3000 PCI
WIN2K PRO
@HOME Internet Conx.

-Latest drivers, BIOS, and software service packs (thx to Windrivers).

So there you have it. That's my two cents about ATA100. Save your money. I heard something about new disks coming out very soon which are 4x the speed of the fastest drives today. Anyone heard anything similar?

Sky

[This message has been edited by SkyGeek (edited February 26, 2001).]

[tracker]

I agree, the jump from 33 to 66 is good stuff (provided you let windows know!). Most drives shipping run at 100 (Western Digital for sure, not certain about other manufacturers).

Has anyone used one of those Add-in 66/100 ide controller cards? Are they decent?

Craig

[ViPeR210]

I have the ASUS A7V and it has on-board ATA-100, but if it is enabled, it shares an IRQ with PCI slot 2. That sucks. I doubt the ATA-100 is that much better then the 66. If you want a real speed improvement, move to SCSI.

[ktubaugh]

Worth the upgrade:
ATA/33 to ATA/66 - Won't really notice.
ATA/66 to ATA/100 - May notice.
ATA/33 to ATA/100 - Yep, you'll know.

As far as SCSI goes... unless you have a lot of money to burn, the only real advantage you will see is better reliability. It's kind of like comparing a Honda to a Hyundai. By the way, any good 7200 rpm ATA/100 should be able to theorically outperform any 7200 rpm SCSI 2 drive (i.e. 100Mbs vs. 80Mbs).

For more info on SCSI, see the following link:
http://www.hardwarecentral.com/hardw...tral/print/36/

K.

[ktubaugh]

Worth the upgrade:
ATA/33 to ATA/66 - Won't really notice.
ATA/66 to ATA/100 - May notice.
ATA/33 to ATA/100 - Yep, you'll know.

As far as SCSI goes... unless you have a lot of money to burn, the only real advantage you will see is better reliability. It's kind of like comparing a Honda to a Hyundai. By the way, any good 7200 rpm ATA/100 should be able to theorically outperform any 7200 rpm SCSI 2 drive (i.e. 100Mbs vs. 80Mbs).

For more info on SCSI, see the following link:
http://www.hardwarecentral.com/hardw...tral/print/36/

K.

[SkyGeek]

For those of you with an Intel chipset, you can download the latest Ultra ATA storage drivers for Windows 98/Me/2000 at: http://support.intel.com/support/chi...aata/index.htm


SkyGeek

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by tracker:
I agree, the jump from 33 to 66 is good stuff (provided you let windows know!).

Craig</font>

[This message has been edited by SkyGeek (edited February 25, 2001).]

[Buzz_Kill]

I just purchased the Maxtor 80G Ultra ATA 100. Ran out of room on my two ATA66 13G & 30G. My SD11 MB doesn't support ATA100, but trying to think ahead, I went ahead and purchased it. Maxtor also makes an Ultra ATA 100 PCI card that allows for four more peripherals to be installed.
I notice a slight difference in the 66 vs. 100. If I was advising someone today which to buy, I would say spend a few more dollars for the ATA 100. IMHO

[format c:]

Some one was interested in the ata 100 controller card
I have an Asus p3v4x board that supports ata66 on board, I bought a 30 gig quantum ata 100 drive and the controller card from Promise technologies and it works sweet, My drive screams now, I havee noticed some improvement over my ata 66 quantum 20 gig, I made the move so that my cd burner and cd reader could be on their own seperate controllers
I think it is worth the money to go for the ata 100 drives and if your board is good then get the controller card ( remember in your bios setup to set your first boot device as scsi )
and another thing you can have one drive on the card and a Linux drive on your mother board controller if you want to try out another OS
Well what is next ata 133 ?

------------------
Format c I'm givin er all she's got cap'in !!! )

[s154gm]

I have to agree.. I'm running the Promise Technologies Ultra 100 with an IBM Deskstar 75GXP. Wow, what a great combination. With an Athlon 850 this combo really screams. DVD, CDRW, and 2 hard drives all have their own controller.
The card is a great investment.

[Sparky625]

Well, just like format c: I've got a P3V4X with a Promise ATA 100 add-in card. And, just like Buzz_Kill I've got the Maxtor 80G drive. I had special circumstances when I upgraded from 33 to 66 and from 66 to 100, so I can't really say if the difference was noticeable. (Having problems with a goofy chipset and using 255W on a 250W PS ) But, I do know that a clean install on a new system running 100 goes noticeably faster than anything I've seen, including a new install on a 66 drive.
My recommendation would be to get a 100 drive if you've got a controller that supports it and you're buying anyway, but there's no need to go buy a controller and drive just to try and squeeze out some speed. The change is good, but it won't bring a tear to your eye.


------------------
Thank you for calling the support desk! How may I disconnect you today?

[compaqman]

Currently running Asus K7M (AMD 750 chipset with VIA ATA66 controller). I upgraded to the Promise ATA100 IDE RAID card, added two IBM 45GB ATA100 7200RPM drives, its a new machine! It's a bit noisy with both drives in their in a Stripe config (uses both drives to apear as one), but the performance was well worth it! Also, stated above that you wouldn't notice a difference, from ATA33 to 66? I certainly did...

------------------
Net Appliances: The Next Generation... The USB Toaster.

[captpackrat]

I added a Promise Ultra100 to my 440BX (UDMA 33), and added a pair of Maxtor 60's. The speed seems to be a little bit better than the WD 13&17 that I was using. And I can use the onboard controllers for my CD's and such.

I am curious to see how well that AMSET utility will work....




------------------
Captain Troy D. Pack Rat
`akbar Press

If you're furry and you know it, hug the mouse!

[b4uc1i81]

I doubt you should see signifigant gains from 66 to 100. If you think about it, 33 to 66 is 100% increase, so yes, that you can notice. But 66 to 100, aaannnnnhhh. 50% only.

[Ander]

Guys,

ATA/100? Save your dough. With today's hardware, it's meaningless. In practical terms, there's no way any hard drive can transmit data at 100 megs per second (ATA/100).

Remember, a hard drive is still a mechanical device with heads that have to move around reading and writing. No hard drive ever made has mechanics that can move fast enough to exploit a ATA/100 transmission speed.

The only part of a hard drive that can communicate that fast is the cache---the drive's one or two megs of built-in RAM. Compared to the actual disk itself, this amount of memory is almost nonexistant. Also, consider that data in the cache is data you've already read---so the odds are, you're going to want to access disk data, not cache data.

It's very sneaky how drive-makers have marketed this whole thing. Yes, so-called ATA/100 drives can communicate with the mobo's controller at that speed---but if you can't access your data that fast, what's the point?

Listen to how Seagate weasels around this:

Q. : Will performance be affected if I have to set an Ultra ATA/100 disc drive to a slower speed in order to maintain compatibility with my system?

A. : Changing the transfer mode affects only the external transfer rate of the device. If an Ultra ATA/100 device is configured for a slower transfer mode, its maximum speed will of course be limited to the maximum burst transfer rate of that mode. However, the internal performance is not affected by the external transfer mode, therefore the sustained transfer rate will not be as drastically affected as the maximum (burst) transfer rate.

Translation:

If you step down from ATA/100 to ATA/66, your drive's "external" (mobo to drive) speed will decrease. However, your drive's "internal" speed (drive heads to cable) speed will not be affected---because it's always way slower than ATA/100!

To wrap up: I recently went to the PC shop to buy a new hard drive. I settled on a Quantum Fireball "ATA/100" drive. My mobo is only ATA/66, so I told the salesguy I'd also need an ATA/100 controller card.

The salesguy---a technician who happened to be working in front that day---took me aside and explained the whole silly 66/100 thing to me. He even showed me some specs on Western Digital's site, proving the point. (There are still some honest people in the world, huh?) Since then, I've read confirmations of this on very trustworthy websites.

So stick with your ATA/66 drives and be happy.