Real-world performance of ATA133 vs ATA100

[VicLavigne]

I'm considering getting a new mobo, and was debating whether to get a good KT266a based board, or look for one with ATA133 compatible IDE controllers. What would be the performance difference between the two?

 

[AndyHui]

None.

The only reason why you would go straight for an ATA133 board is that ATA133 boards automatically include support for drives greater than 128GB.

With no drive capable of burst rates greater than 80MB/s from buffer, and none capable of sustained transfer rates greater than 42MB/s, there is usually little reason to get ATA100 over ATA66, let alone ATA133.

Put it this way: raising the speed limit from 100 to 133 is no good if you can only do 40, right?

 

[VicLavigne]

Thank you very much, I had a feeling that ATA133 was missing something (didn't see lots of people jumping on ATA133 bandwagon).

 

[sad]

At this point in time, i wouldn't settle for a board with ata100. New boards are-a-coming. Breaking the 128GB barrier is a BIG plus.

<< With no drive capable of burst rates greater than 80MB/s from buffer, and none capable of sustained transfer rates greater than 42MB/s, there is usually little reason to get ATA100 over ATA66, let alone ATA133. >>

How about a person like myself who has multiple harddrives (currently I have 4),wouldn't the added bandwidth help?

 

[Marrkks]

Breaking the 128GB barrier is a BIG plus

it would seem that would be a bigger benifit at the moment....but a) how many 128G partitions do you need? b)maybe higher RPM drives will change that.

just thoughts.

 

[AndyHui]

It's not a 128GB partition....it's the 28-bit LBA addressing for an entire drive that makes the 128GB limit.

The IDE system is such that only 1 drive, either the master, or the slave can transmit data at a time on a single port. Having multiple drives is not going to make any difference.

 

[Pariah]

The difference won't be much, nothing you would notice anyway. The 2 drives that stand to benefit the most, the 2 WD JB drives, unfortunately are not ATA133 drives. That being said, there is no reason not to go to with an ATA133 capable board, considering the price difference should be negligible. There are other benefits to ATA133 besides just potential increased throughput.

The reason IDE drives can't burst much over 80MB/s is interface overhead. Increasing potential bandwidth will increase burst rates. Unless IDE manufacturers found some unique 100MHz SDRAM that can't transfer data faster than 80MB/s.

"How about a person like myself who has multiple harddrives (currently I have 4),wouldn't the added bandwidth help?"

You won't see much either, unless you have 4 WD1200BB/JB or 4 IBM 120GXP's. The occurences where you are using more than one on a channel at full speed is probably not very often anyway. Currently, IDE drives just aren't fast enough for any of these limits to pose real caps on performance.