ATA / 100 interface

[yardape13]

Me again. I'm looking at 2 different Seagate 20 gig hardrives, both 7200 rpm, but one has ATA/ 100 interface for $10 more. No clue what this is. Thanks!

 

[osuman]

The 100 refers to the theoretical burst transfer rate in MB/sec. Other new drives are most likely ATA66. Meaning their rate is 66MB/sec. It will never really run that fast but for $10 more i'd probably go for it. You have to get a motherboard that will support it also.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

Just to clarify osuman's good point, you only need to make sure your motherboard supports ATA 100 if you want to take advantage of the theoretical and real performance gains.

So you could buy an ATA 100 disk with a view to the future - it will work on any IDE motherboard with an ATA interface, but will not run at its potential speed.

It should come with a special ATA66/100/133 cable, which should be used with it, if your disk controller supports it.

I hope this helps

 

[teknikal]

Yeah, currently the fastest drives usually peak at 40-50 MB/sec. So you won't notice much difference using ATA 100 over ATA 66. However, it is important to note that having the extra overhead can actually improve overall performance. It may not be "faster" at any given moment, but the overhead helps the system be more responsive over a period of time. In other words, there is less of a bottleneck.

Also, you shouldn't be too concerned about having to buy a hard drive that supports ATA 100 right now (although almost all newer drives do). The main concern should be having a motherboard that does, for drives that will eventually become faster than what the ATA66 standard allows.

tek

 

[ceh4702]

The ATA/100 Require a special EIDE cable that has extra shielding. If the motherboard doesnt support ATA/100 it will just run in a different mode, like ATA/66. Most hard drives run in many different modes, so they are backward compatable. The faster they spin, the hotter they get. If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[teknikal]

ceh4702,
On one system of mine, I'm running a P-III 800MHz on an Intel mobo (815EEB). This mobo supports ATA 100. There was a driver that came on the cd which allowed Windows to work with the BIOS correctly to support ATA 100. I HAVE NO SPECIAL EIDE CABLE. Are you trying to say that all mobos that don't use a special cable can't support ATA 100?

I even ran benchmarks before & after installing the driver in Windows for ATA 100. The hard drive performed 15% faster with the driver installed...

tek

 

[neomagic]

Check the specs on these three 30gb drives

DPTA-353000
5400rpm ata/66 19.9mb/sec sustained 2mb cache

http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/desk/ds37gp.htm

DTLA-305030
5400rpm ata/100 32mb/sec sustained 512kb cache

http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/desk/ds40gv.htm

DTLA-307030
7200rpm ata/100 37mb/sec sustained 2mb cache

http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/desk/ds75gxp.htm

Remember...what ever your wallet can handle.