controller card performance question

[ZippyDan]

im thinking of getting an ata100 pci controller card to go along with my new ata100 harddrive in an ata33 machine. this new HD will be primary boot up device

the question is this... theres only one PCI bus... and i assume theres some cpu overhead for using PCI (same with IDE tho too)

anyway, ill come to the point, whats better, plugging the HD directly into the Motherboard for ata33, or using the card to go to ata100?

same question on another older machine, better PIO mode 4 in motherboard or ata33 on controller card?

and on that note, ive got another machine that is ata100 with an ata100 driver, and CDROM and a CD-RW. i bought an extra ata100 controller card so each device could have its own channel (especially for writing from CDROM to CDRW). is it better to put the CD or the CD-RW on the controller card?

thx

~Zippy!

 

[So]

You should definitely put the HD on the ATA 100 card, as you said, the IDE controller is basically an integrated PCI controller, so there is very little more overhead than if you ran it off the MB controller. Same thing goes for an old PC.

I don't know if it really matters any more, but back when ATA66 came out, you werent supposed to run anything but HD's off those controllers, because of potential compatiblility issues. Additionally, the CD drives won't really take advantage of the ATA100 (or ATA66 for that matter). Like I said, I don't know if it matters any more, but I personally would just put the CD-Roms on the Motherboard controller and your Hard Drives on the Add in.