Maxtor UATA-100 Controller vs EIDE UDMA33 Onboard

[trauschu]

I went out to CompUSA yesterday and bought the 45 Gig Maxtor, and got the ATA-100 Controller for free with the drive. I have the Abit BH6 motherboard, and am currently using the onboard EIDE UDMA33 controller. Should I take the time to disable the onboard and switch to the new controller, or will I be able to notice the difference?

Thanks in advance.

 

[DaddyG]

Sijnce your onboard controller is only UDMA33 its worth switching to the 100 controller.

 

[Noriaki]

Not 100% sure about the Maxtor 45Gig but the IBM 75GXP can sustain about 37MB/s transfer rate so upgrade from ATA33 to 66 or 100 would be a good move. The DMax+45 is suppose to be nearly as fast as the 75GXP, and especially if you have something slaved to it I'd go for the ATA100.

 

[trauschu]

I am getting about 17200 as my drive benchmark score on SiSoft Sandra with my old UDMA33 controller, anyone have any idea what is may benchmark at with the new controller?

 

[Rand]

You'lll see a small performance boost with the UDMA100 controller, might as well use it.

 

[SUOrangeman]

What chip is used on the Maxtor card?

-SUO

 

[LXi]

If its a Promise chip, definitely use it, if its HiPoint, throw it away immeidiately.

The DiamondMax Plus 45 transfers at about at about 32.6MB/sec, which is close to the maximum of ATA33, so I would take advantage of the ATA100 controller.

 

[oldfart]

What LXi said.

 

[SecretAgentMan]

I've got the exact same setup as you trauschu, but I seem to be having some problems getting my system to boot into windows when I have my drive hooked up to the ATA-100 controller. I have the BIOS set to disable the onboard controllers and boot to the ATA-100 card first, but it always locks up or gives me "Non system disk. Please replace" error. Any thoughts on how to fix this? I thought changing the PCI slot might help, that's my next move. LMK if you guys have any similar experiences.

 

[SecretAgentMan]

oops double post, becuase I forgot to subscribe the first time