UDMA Question

[TechWulf]

I'm not to familliar with UDMA, can someone tell me if you need a special cable to use the faster transfer rates, or does it work with a standard IDE cable? Is there a document that I can read more on UDMAand Ultra ATA?

Also if someone knows of one, I'm looking for a better defragmenting program than MS Defrag....

[stevens]

As I understand it, UDMA is the technology that allows hard drives to effectively double tasfer rates to 33 megs per second and Ultra ATA is the technology the hard drive uses to support UDMA. No special cable is needed but you do need to make sure That the Motherboard or hard disk controller supports UDMA and that the drive is Ultra DMA capable. As far as defragmenting Nortons is best. I wouldnt use most other utilities but the defragmenter is good. I heard they are the ones who wrote the defragmenter for Microsoft.

[Damned Angel]

In order to use UDMA66 u need 3 things. A mother board that supports it, a hard drive that supports it and a UDMA66 cable (supplied with motherboard that supports it). Both ends of the cable as well as the connectors on the mbd and hard drive both still have 40 pins, but the cable itself has 80 traces (40 for standard data transfer and another 40 to filter out any line noise). If you try to use a regulare ide cable with a UDMA66 device, you will not be using the device to its full potential and the data transfer will default to UDMA33. Most drive manufactures also have a flash prog available to flash the drive to udma33 and udma66 depending of what your motherboard supports (please note that you can always flash a drive back from udma33 to udma66 if so needed).

Hope this helps.

[hireintelligence]

I am curious to check their claim that HD through put is actually 66m/s. If any1 knows please post it!

[stevens]

Hireintellience, cached throughput can reach 66 mps but since most hard drives have only 2 megs of cache it doesnt amount to much. The best IDE hard drives now havent hit the 33 mps barrier yet. I hear a new UDMA100 is on the way next.

[weazel]

personally I prefer SCSI...but thats just me