A Little Confusion about the a7v's ata-100 controller

[killabeas]

I am a little confused about the ata-100 controller.

I have two hard drives (both 7200 rpm ata-66 drives) and a dvd drive and burner hooked up to the two ata-66 channels.

What I'm confused about is......if i were to go out and buy a ata66 hard drive or a burner, would it work if i hooked it up to the ata-100 channels?

 

[killabeas]

BUMP

someone please help me out before i go waste my money on another hard drive that i may or may not be able to use

 

[jonnyGURU]

Virtually any drive, ATA100 or not, should work on the Promise ATA100 controller.

 

[chottoed]

it is suggested that dvd/cd/cdr/cdrw drives be hooked up to the regular controller and not the ata100 if possible... however, ata100 is fully backward compatible whether its u33 or u66

 

[JimmyD]

The Promise ATA/100 Controller (and all ATA/100 Controller's for that matter) is fully backward compatible with all UDMA66/UDMA33/PIO Mode 1,2,3 and 4 drives. Basically any IDE drive will work. I even tried an old 80mb Quantum on it and it ran fine (and slow . You should go ahead and run you hard drives off of the Promise controller now since it has actually shown to be a little faster than the VIA Controller even with UDMA66/33 Drives. You can run your CD-ROM Drives off of it now also, just remember that the Promise controller is not capable of booting off of the CD-ROM drive, so if you wanted to boot from your win98 CD to install, you'd need to first switch it back to the VIA Controller. Win9x will recognize the Promise Controller as a Generic IDE and install to it. Windows 2k/NT and Linux however, will not acknowledge the Promise controller from the install program, this means that you either need to get a special boot disk for the OS with drivers in order to install, or else plug your drives into the VIA Controller, install the OS, install the Promise drivers and switch back.

Jay

 

[JimmyD]

In short, put 1 hard drive as the Promise Primary Master, the other HD as the Promise Secondary Master, DVD as VIA Primary Master and the CDR as VIA Secondary Master, this will give you the best performance since each drive will have it's own channel.

Jay

 

[Citadel]

Some CDRW's (Ricoh, Mitsumi) that I have installed on A7V's tend to burn more coasters when they are on the Promise 100. I do have my Plextor connected to the Promise and it is working great!

 

[killabeas]

thanks alot for the help guys

now if i can figure out how to get my 750 tbird running a little faster