Question about PCI IDE controller card

[inqztive]

Normal ATA 66 controller on mobo has a clock speed of 66 Mhz in UDMA mode 4. How does a PCE controller card working at 33 Mhz can improve the performance to ATA 100?

 

[Noriaki]

It's 66MB/s not Mhz.

PCI supports 266MB/s (32bit @ 33Mhz) so it's more than enough for ATA66 (or ATA100).

 

[inqztive]

Okay that answers my question. But it's fact that the clock speed for IDE bus is 66 Mhz on my board (VIA kx 133). I didn't consider the fact that the clock speed should be multiplied by the no of bits that can be tranfered to get the max theritical bandwidth.

 

[inqztive]

has anyone used VIA 4.29? I use 686A south bridge. Do i need to get service pack 2 for win2k in order to install 4.29 and make it perform properly?

 

[Howard]

You don't need any service pack to install them. My friend has them on a Windows 2000 setup, runs flawlessly.

 

[inqztive]

Another question to Noriaki? This 266 Mb/s.. is the max total bandwith that is avlaible to all PCI slots and they share amongst themselves? Or that 266 mb/s is avlaible to each one of the Master slots?

 

[GFORCE100]

No. 32bit PCI is 132MB/sec
64bit PCI used on server boards is 264MB/sec

 

[Rand]

Your confusing megabytes/second with MHz.
And ATA66 controller can run at up to 66MB/sec.

The IDE bus is based off of the PCI bus, which on the KX133 runs at 33MHz 32bits for a peak theoretical transfer rate of 132MB/second. 32bits divided by 8 = 4 multiplied by MHz (33) for 132MB/second.

There is also 64bit and 66MHz PCI buses but those are primarily releaged to server boards.

The 132MB/second is shared among all of the PCI slots.

Also, you do not need any service pack to use the 4.29 Via 4in1 drivers, I use them under Win2k myself and they work beautifully.