ATA 100 card when MOBO is 66MHz?

[Crank]

I have a question and didn't find what I was looking for after searching this forum.
I got in on the Maxtor HD deal that came with the ATA100 controller card. I've got an old PII/400 system, and I don't know for sure, but I think my CPU bus is only 66MHz. Will adding the controller card in get me any additional performance out of the HD?
It's kind of a pain to run your main HD from the card - scandisk in Win98/SE won't run because DOS can't find the controller card, etc.
Am I correct in thinking that the CPU bus will basically limit the HD to 66MHz anyway?

Thanks in advance for the help.

 

[Mday]

the 66MHz is only between the memory, the core chipset and the processor. the PCI bus still operates at 33 MHz as it always has on desktop systems. you will get extra performance out of the HDD with the card.

why are you running scandisk in DOS?

 

[Crank]

If you don't shut down properly then Windows runs it for you. When I hooked the controller card up, the computer would hang - I guess trying to find the HD, which it couldn't....very annoying, but since I turned the option off, it won't be a problem anymore.
If the system bus is stuck at 33MHz, then how will the card give more performance?
Sorry to ask you to spell it out, but I'm not a computer genius.

 

[Quickfingerz]

it depends on the hard drive. your har drive must be able to have a sustained transfer of 30+ mb/sec. what hard drive are you using?

 

[amgkid]

um it's not 100 mhz if that's what you're thinking. it's 100MB/S maximum transfer rate i believe

 

[GT578]

Your PII400 has 100mhz cpu bus (100 x 4.0). Adding the ATA100 card will get you some benefits I guess...not really enough to notice from what I've seen. If DOS can't find the card then something is wrong with your motherboard configuration. Your board should detect it when you boot up your computer.

 

[Crank]

I'm using a Maxtor Diamnond Max 7200RPM 60GB HDD.
My computer does recognize the card on boot up, but you can't access it from DOS - I think it's like the problem you get if you have a WinModem and try to run it from DOS (you can't).
The first time I ran into this problem was when I was using Maxtor's utility to set the Acoustic Management on my drive - DOS cannot find the HDD unless it's plugged directly into the IDE port on the MOBO.
The ATA/100 card isn't MHz?? Sorry for my ignorance. I also didn't know that my PII MOBO had a 100MHz bus - the first person who replied to the thread seemed to think that my Memory to CPU bus was 66MHz and my PCI to CPU bus was only 33MHz.
Now I'm really confused.
Can anybody give me a more definitive answer?
Thanks.

 

[Crank]

^

 

[DisposableHero]

win2k does have that gay scandisk when u dont shutdown

 

[SpideyCU]

They are correct.

Your PCI bus is 33 MHz.
Your Front-Side Bus is either 66 or 100, but with the setup described (a P2-400) I'm pretty sure it's 100 MHz.

The ATA-100 card doesn't care about any of this AT ALL. ATA-100 means it can pass a maximum of 100 Mb/s for any IDE hard drive attached to that controller (which, surprise surprise, no hard drive is going to break, heh). This has nothing to do with the other topics you were discussing; the PCI controller card will do its thing. Performance boost might be there, but it won't be great. And like someone else mentioned, if DOS can't recognize it, something's wrong.

Getting back to your original question, it's irrelevant because you were mixing two different units. Your system won't "limit" your hard drive's performance; the IDE controller card will do just fine on its own.

 

[drewski]

What motherboard do you have? It sounds like the comparo you are looking for is ATA100 controller card vs the onboard IDE ports.

If they are ATA66, even, you probably won't see much if any gain by going to an ATA100 controller. If the onboard controllers are ATA33 or lower, you'll probably see some gains.

Also, the HDD(s) you have looks like it's ATA100 so you should probably have it connected to at least a ATA66 controller.

FInally, make sure you are using a 80-wire ATA66/100 IDE cable and not the older 40-wire cables. If you use the older cable you will be limited to ATA33 speeds.

 

[Noriaki]

A 66Mhz memory bus is 533MB/s tons of room to take advantages of ATA100s 100MB/s. ATA100 is not 100Mhz...it's 100MB/s