Promise ATA/100 Card VS Maxtor ATA/100 Card..

[Ender510]

Which is better between the two? I recently got 2 30 GIG drives ATA/100 7200 RPM Maxtors, but have had the Promise ATA/100 controller from before. I also have the Maxtor ATA/100 Card.

Which should I use? Also, I heard it's not good to hook up CDROM and CDRW drives to ATA/100 as well.. is this true? Here is what I have:

2 6 GIG WD and Maxtor ATA/33
2 30 GIG Maxtors ATA/100 7200 RPM
1 30 GIG Quantum ATA/66 7200 RPM
1 CD ROM DRIVE Toshiba 40x
1 CD ROM DRIVE Plextor 40x
1 CDRW Plextor 12x

How should I hook up these devices? Which to the mobo, which master/slave, and which to which controller??

I am also in the process of setting up a linux server and will use the following for that:

Toshiba 40x CD ROM
30 GIG Quantum Drive

So given this, what should I configure with the system? What now and then when I do build the server later? Thanks guys..

 

[Ender510]

bump..

 

[bacillus]

afaik, the maxtor card uses the promise chip so they should be about the same in terms of performance!

 

[RanDum72]

They are the same card. The Maxtor cards are rebadged Promise cards.

 

[kaborka]

The Maxtor card is a rebadged Promise, but there are some differences. WinXP beta2 has built-in drivers for the Promise. It did not recognize my Maxtor ATA. The BIOS has Maxtor in the ID string, which you'll see in the Device Mgr.
"Raincity" on these forums has flashed this card to the Promise BIOS. I am planning to try that too after I back everything up. Here's our earlier thread.

 

[Ender510]

Thx for the replies.. so basically, I should use the Promise controller over the Maxtor then. Since the maxtor is just rebadged to be a promise?

 

[RedShirt]

I have a Maxtor one. I flased it to the Promise Bios and use the Promise Drivers. They are 100% alike in every way, except one says maxtor on the actual card.

 

[kaborka]

Redshirt: Couple of questions about flashing the Maxtor with the Promise BIOS.

1. Did it change the ID string to show as Promise card instead of a "Maxtor Ultra ATA 100 IDE Controller"?
2. If you had WinNT/2K already installed, did it "adjust" to the BIOS change without having to reinstall/repair?

I'm worried about having to reinstall Win2K if the card's ID string changes.

Thanks!

 

[Ender510]

I'm wondering.. should I flash the maxtor card to a promise one? What benefit do I get by doing this??

 

[Lvis]

Under device manager, my Maxtor card shows up as a promise. This is with win me.

A few days after installing it, I visited windows update, and they had some kind of patch, driver, whatever, for download. I installed it, nothing bad happened I only mention it because I'd never seen an update for a specific piece of hardware there before.

I have no idea what it did, the card and this machine ran fine before and after the "update".

 

[RedShirt]

I'm running Windows 2000 and it was perfectly fine doing this... The Drivers and Bios's are the same. I just like the sound of Promise over Maxtor for an ATA card

 

[kaborka]

RedShirt: Based on your comments I went ahead and did the deed. Now the ID string sez Promise only, Maxtor is gone. Win2k Svr came up without a glitch. I'm a happy camper.

The next step is to see if WinXP will now recognize the card and use its built-in Promise drivers. I'll let you know if that works.

Ender: The Maxtor card I bought came with the latest Promise BIOS and drivers, so there's no real advantage to changing anything. The update did install an additional driver "evian.sys" that the Promise site describes as a "Promise performance driver". This driver was not included with the Maxtor setup disk for the card. [Does anyone know what this does?]

I am hoping that WinXP will use its native support for the Promise card without the F5 thing during setup. If this works, then I'd say do the flash before you upgrade to XP.