Can I use an ATA100 hard drive on an ATA66 controller?

[georgeg]

If I hook an ATA100 hard drive to my ATA66 controller (onboard my MSI BXMaster mobo), will it function as an ATA66 hard disk? Will it work at all?

 

[Ryan]

yes it will, the speed will be lowered.

 

[Biggs]

Yes it would but it would be "limited" by the ATA-66 protocol. ATA-100 drives are fully backwards compatible btw.

 

[oldfart]

Yes, it will work fine and you will not see any significant reduction in speed. The STR of the fastest IDE HD's are still no where near saturating an ATA66 interface.

 

[AndyHui]

Yup.

Burst rates for the fastest hard drives are just peaking at 80MB/s from the buffer.

Sustained Transfer Rates are still capped at around 47MB/s for the very fastest of drives.

You won't see any difference in performance; all ATA standard drives are backwards and forwards compatible.

 

[Daovonnaex]

<< You won't see any difference in performance; all ATA standard drives are backwards and forwards compatible. >>

Not quite, because ATA33 and up require 80 conductor cables (unless you don't want UDMA...).

 

[oldfart]

ATA33 does not require an 80 wire cable, nor do you need it for UDMA support

 

[Mavrick007]

Yes you can use an ata100 drive on an ata66 controller. It will default to the ata66 and then the slowest drive on the same channel, so don't use an ata33 drive with the ata100 drive unless you want lower performance.

 

[AndyHui]

<< It will default to the ata66 and then the slowest drive on the same channel, so don't use an ata33 drive with the ata100 drive unless you want lower performance. >>



No.

All modern chipsets support independent IDE device timing, so the slowest device on the channel WILL NOT affect the speed of the faster one.