Good ATA 133 Card??

[moosey]

Whats a good ultra 133 card to get? Its just for 2 hard drives and usual use, nothing special. I wanted faster transfers between drives and I also play games. I don't want to spend a whole lot for features I don't need. Also, whats the benefit of having raid? Thanks

 

[Vegito]

wait a few more week, get sata cards, get sata drives and you'll be much happier

 

[LouPoir]

Any ata card will do.

 

[uncleX]

>Also, whats the benefit of having raid?

On a PC using 2 IDE drives, possibly up to 10% speed improvement under certain conditions which rarely apply. More normally 2%.

 

[Bovinicus]

If you already have an ATA100 HDD controller, then don't even bother going with an ATA133 controller. It is going to boost your performance by 0. RAID, on the other hand, will boost your performance quite a bit. It is true that most applications won't see much of an improvement in benchmarkable performace. This is because once programs are loaded into memory RAID no longer has much of an impact. It will drastically reduce boot up times and load times for games and applications. Also, it should make your OS feel much more respsonsive.

 

[warrenpeace]

"If you already have an ATA100 HDD controller, then don't even bother going with an ATA133 controller. It is going to boost your performance by 0."

I essentially agree with this completely. The improvement you will see between an ata100 and 133 controller will be almost non-existant, as sustained transfers at those speeds are very very rare. The additional bootup time it ads as the card's driver loads is annoying enough to offset the speed gains If you have an ATA66 controller now, it is worthwhile though.

However, if you are looking to ad more devices than you can run without an ad in card, then the 133 is the way to go.

I recieved one free with a maxtor ata133 hard drive, and i used it so that i could run two hard drives, a CDRW drive and a DVD drive, and have every drive running as a master on it's own channel. It did make measurable improvements in CD burning performance, especially when doing other tasks while burning a CD which is normally taboo.

The one i have is a maxtor, which is really a Promise (not even re-labeled). I have heard other people running into issues with Promise's ata100 card, but i never had one stability issue with my 133 card.

I am now running RAID for the hard drives and no longer use the ATA133 card. I have seen much more than a 2% or even 10% improvement from the raid setup, but i do a lot of video editing and photoshop where the file sizes are better suited to it, as well as using drives with 8mb buffers in the raid array.

 

[moosey]

if i run 2 hard drives off the 133 card and give both my cd drives the channels on the mobo will this make any difference?