Hard drive (DMA100) question... help!

SOS

Member
Aug 28, 2000
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Hi,

I need to know if it's worth getting a motherboard that supports DMA100. If you have a 7200 DMA100 HD on a motherboard with ULTRA/ATA-66, and the same HD on a motherboard with ULTRA/ATA-100, will there be any speed difference in the HD?

I've read that the bandwidth with ULTRA/ATA-66 is already plenty large enough to handle the throughput, so there will be no speed difference. Is this true?

Thanks

SOS
 

Viper GTS

Lifer
Oct 13, 1999
38,107
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The speed difference will mainly show up in burst transfers. Most of today's 7200 RPM drives won't notice much, if any, difference between ATA66 & 100.

Viper GTS
 

LXi

Diamond Member
Apr 18, 2000
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The IBM 75GXP is the first drive to take on the ATA33 limits. Drives nowadays will be just fine with ATA66. But if you have cash for a i815E or KT133 w/ onboard controller, why not? I also heard that drives perform better with the onboard ATA66 than controller ATA100.
 

Barny

Member
Aug 28, 2000
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I had this same question awhile back.
The 75GXP is the fastest drive out there right now, it can 'sustain' a data transfer rate of 37MB/Second. Still well below the 66MB/Second transfer rate that can be achieved on the ATA/66 controller.
As Viper GTS pointed out, the only benefit of the ATA/100 would be in burst transfers, meaning you'd get up to 100MB/sec transfer rates when writing data to the 2MB cache on the 75GXP. You probably wouldn't see any burst data reading from the drive though since the controller (ATA/66 or ATA/100) would be able to keep up with the data coming off the drive, so the cache wouldn't ever fill up and 'burst' on a read operation.
To net it out, the current benefits of ATA/100 seem to be minimal and you probably wouldn't be able to tell any difference. However, if you have the ATA/100 controller, you're well positioned for the future. Eventually, there WILL be a device that can overrun the ATA/66 and make the ATA/100 the preferred choice.
 

SOS

Member
Aug 28, 2000
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Intersting review. The question now is would I get the same type of performance from the onboard highpoint ATA100 controller that comes with the ABit KT7-RAID?

Thanks

SOS