Promise ATA-100 IDE controller.. worth it??

[WindRunner]

I just picked one up along with a Maxtor 30 GIG ATA-100 Plus 7200 RPM drive. I got the controller cause I have a BX board so no original support for anything other than UDMA-33. The thing is that I really did not notice that much difference in benchmarks such as Wintune or Norton Disk test. It most certainly feels faster but of course that took for ever to set up and to figure out that MAXTOR sets their new drives with the SLOW setting to keep them QUIET. After downloading a utility from Maxtor I set the drive to OFF or FAST and although I can hear it now.. it is quite faster. Thing is that my bus 40 Gig Maxtor Plus 7200 RPM rips mine to pieces and he does not even have ATA-100 support. I am using the cable thanks.

Anyone have one of these controllers or has noticed something great about the ATA-100 speeds I should know about?

P3-800 not O/C
256 PC-133 RAM
ABIT BX6-R2 board
GeForce DDR PRO 32 MEGS

thanks

 

[(Chanse)]

The main advantage I've found with ATA-100 is not that the drive will really be any faster, but since both devices on a controller have to share the speed, having 100 to divide between 2 drives allows them to not be hampered by the other using all the available bandwidth. So even with an ATA100 drive, it won't be significantly faster, both devices will run faster overall. At least that's what I've discovered by testing a bunch of various configs.

 

[Coolie]

I have the exact same HD / controller. Unfortunately I didn't run any benchmarks before I installed the controller, so I don't know what kind of speed increase there was. What I like about it is that I can run my HD off of the controller in ATA 100 mode, my CD-ROM drive on IDE1 in UDMA mode, and my burner on IDE2 in PIO mode.