How much better performance from ATA100 controller with IBM 75GXP?

[JasonG]

Hey Guys,

I recently purchased an IBM 75GXP 30 GB Drive.

I installed it and configured it on my regular ATA33 primary channel and it seems to run great. (Windows Me with Celeron II at 850 Mhz)

How much of a performance boost will I see if I put it on an ATA 100 channel on an add on card like the promise ata 100 pci card?

Do any of you have any real performance numbers for the difference?

I'm trying to save a pci slot if possible but if it will make a huge difference, I would consider it.

Thanks.

Jason

 

[Modus]

Right now, the performance gain going from ATA/33 to ATA/66 is insignificant, while the performance gain from ATA/66 to ATA/100 is non-existant.

Modus

 

[riftwalker]

Drives throughput haven't arrived at 66MB/s as yet, there is just the standard for that when it happens. The ata 100 is yet another standard to come in the future. With that said if the drive can't get 66Mb/s its obvious it wont reach 100MB/s (which is faster than ultra wide scsi). So the answer is it wont improve your drive's perfomance. If you plan on keeping your board for some time, maybe with luck, you may be able to truly utilize those spots. In the worst case, they are all backward compatible so if you manage to have more ide devices you may be happy, but ofcourse im sure no one will have that many devices as are supported by newer motherboards.

RIFT

 

[Noriaki]

An IBM75GXP maxes out somewhere around 35MB/s, it's slightly about the 33mB/s offered by ATA33, but on the whole it's probably not a big problem.

The question is, do you have the drive by itself? Because it will max out an ATA33 channel, if you have something slaved to it (particularly another high speed hard drive) there will likely be some slowdown if you use it and its slave at the same time, follow?

If it's alone on the ATA33 channel, leave it.
If it's got a slave that uses lots of bandwidth and you think you'll use them both at the same time you may want to upgrde to ATA66 or 100.

 

[JasonG]

Thanks guys.

I think I'll leave it for now.

Anyone else have experience with this drive?

This is a great drive by the way. Very quite and fast (compared to my old drive)!

Jason

 

[Bill]

The difference? Quite a bit really. Take a look here. BTW, that solid red line in the peak category actually maxes out the 80MB/s graph limitation. Yes, they do 100MB/s on the right MB.

Asus CUSL2 w/IBM 75GXP HD


Bill

 

[Prodigy^]

I like the drive, very fast and smooth also, no reason to get an ATA 100 controller yet......yet.....

 

[403Forbidden]

I have 2 of those drives hookedup to my ATA100 controller...

Great performance...don't know exactly how much better than a ATA66
card, but with the small price difference between the two, you might
as well go for ATA100

 

[Doomguy]

Bill: Burst speed does not help performance. What dont you people understand?? ATA/100 yields no performance gain. The max sustained rate for the gxp is 37 megs so ata/66 is a bit faster than ata/33 but ata/100 dosent help at all.

 

[ERJ]

No magnetic hard drive available right now can transfer data at a sustained rate of greater then 33Mbytes/s. However, they do have a memory cache that, if information is in that cache, could potentially max out the data transfer rate of ATA100. As for the slave / master argument I believe that IDE can only transfer from a single device at once on a channel regardless of the bandwidth. It takes SCSI to allow multi-device simultaeous transfer.

ERJ

 

[JasonG]

With the burst speed so high, it probably makes sense to go with an ATA100 controller card.

I know I've seen that this drive can sustain ~36 MB/s so the burst rate would be much higher.

I guess I should use up those spare pci slots .

Thanks guys.

Jason

Edit: Doomguy- Why does the burst speed not affect performance?

 

[Rellik]

U guys are mixing up a few things..
The 100 Mb throughput is NOT the maximimum transfer rate of the HD.
The new IBM drives can deliever rates around 25-30MB that is true.

BUT therefore, with ONLY one drive on the channel, it would not be limited. (it is similar to fillrate limitation tests on gf/x cards.

However, if you used 2 drives in a RAID 0 (striping) array, the
rate could reach around 60 MB/s. So Ultra 66 would be a good idea.

So for a single drive, Ultra 33 or 66 is enough. The good thing about the 100 controller is that u gain ide channels and can put more ide
devices in your pc.

The greatest weakness of IDE is the singethreaded operation, meaning that an ide device can only do one thing at a time and every other
thing on the ide chain has to wait. That is why SCSI systems are better in burning CD´s without a dropout rate and still have resources
to use the computer for light tasks/or heavy if you have a dual setup...

 

[Quickfingerz]

You'll get very little increase performance-wise. But you might gain some convience as far as having more channels and more support for future ATA100 drives.