Performance degrade in using ATA133 pci card for HD?

TygGer

Senior member
Feb 20, 2003
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Are there any performance decreases in connecting a hard drive (Maxtor ATA133) via pci card for the ATA 133?
 

Lord Evermore

Diamond Member
Oct 10, 1999
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If you had something else on the PCI bus that used a lot of bandwidth, it might cause a problem, but for the most part there'd be no noticeable performance limitations.
 

Spac3d

Banned
Jul 3, 2001
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I had a Maxtor ATA100 card that I used for burning cds... my 40x burner would burn more like 6x because of drop in buffers. It was every cdwriter I tried with it... could be a terrible card or my card went bad ... anyways, it was all super slow. Maybe they changed, but just a warning
 

Lord Evermore

Diamond Member
Oct 10, 1999
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A controller card wouldn't have made data transfers so much slower that it couldn't handle 40X (that's only 6MBps). However a bad PCI bus implementation or bad drivers could, or too much other activity going on so that the drive couldn't supply the burner.
 

zephyrprime

Diamond Member
Feb 18, 2001
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Dude! I had the exact same problem as Spac3d with my Ultra133 card! Only for me the problem was with a dvd burner I have. Lord Evermore is right about the fact that bandwidth shouldn't be an issue because burners are slow but there's definitely some sort of problem. I've measured bandwidth on my HD connected to my maxtor U133 card and it's like 10x the speed of my DVD burner but none the less I have buffer underuns. The problem was completely solved by plugging the burner into my MB. It'd be interesting if someone would do some test with the promise cards but I guess they're just not sexy so no one does.