How can you tell if it's ATA/100?

[Cornelius21]

Is there a test to see at what speed my hard drive is transferring data? Or that the MB has detected the drive correctly, or the drivers are installed and operating correctly? I want to make sure that if I purchased and installed an ATA100 drive that it's operating at peak capacity.

Thanks,
Cornelius

 

[bazzla]

Get an evaluation copy of SiSoft Sandra. (sorry don't have the url handy - should be easy to find though)

Then run the HDD indexes/benchmarks, this will give you a comparison to many other configs, from ATA through to ATA/100 RAID.

 

[Cornelius21]

Thanks much! I'll give it a try.
Cornelius

 

[arcaneman]

If you want to see what transfer mode you are in, go to system properties and then device manager. Then look under the properties of your ide controller and you will see the udma mode. udma mode 5 is the ata100 transfer mode. However you won't have to worry if you aren't at udma mode 5 as most hard drives today don't have transfer rates that approach anything near 100 mb/s even in small bursts. The ata100 and ata133 are more marketing gimmicks than anything. There is no real difference between the same drive operating at ata100 vs ata133 modes, so you really only have to worry if your drive is operating under the udma mode 4 or ata66 mode. If you want to see if your drive is performing up to par, benchmark it and compare with results from http://www.storagereview.com and don't forget to factor in the difference between your comp and their testbed.

 

[4824guy]

HD tach software will test your HD and report some benchmarks for you. Look at the read burst speed, that will tell you if that HD is working in ata33 or 66 or 100 mode. The higher the number, the larger the read burst rate. The free download can be got right here