I have 2 ATA/100 7200RPM drives and I found an ATA/133 card for $35 and I was thinking of getting one cuz it seems like a good deal. Will it improve my drive performance at all?
thanks,
-doug
Current IDE harddrives cannot even reach transfer speed of ATA66, not to mention ata100 or ata133...
The only advantage of an ata133 card would be it's ability to support harddrives larger than 137gb... so if u think u might be getting such a large harddrive sometime soon, u might wanna get the ata133 card...
True, some are reaching out of the boundaries of ATA33, but most still sit at around 30mb/sec sustained even at their outer edges. Just making the point that ATA66 is still as good as anything you'll need for the next while.
Dont forget though, even if sustained transfer rates might not go above 40-45, a drive at ata/133 will be able to burst data from the cache in less time than one with ata/100. I'm sure that the difference would be so minimal, however, that it wouldnt be worth the 35$.
The best drive on the market, the "Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB" only manages ~48MB/Sec STR on it's outter edge, falling to ~29MB/Sec STR on it's inner edge (that's ~38MB/Sec Avg STR). This is barely above ATA33 spec and well below ATA66 spec. The only advantage to putting a ATA100 drive on a ATA133 card is if you had a 130GB+ ATA100 drive (which is unlikely).
"a drive at ata/133 will be able to burst data from the cache in less time than one with ata/100."
That would assume that the ata133 controller can hog the entire bandwidth of the PCI bus. (Which I doubt it would be allowed to do).
Note: STR = Sustained Transfer Rate (just in case someone didn't get that from the above posts)
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