Should I buy a ATA/133 Controller card?

[GMUGrad]

I'm building a PC for the very first time. I just ordered a soyo dragon plus, an Athlon XP1600, and a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus Ultra ATA/133 40GB HD. I freaked out when I realized that the dragon plus only supports up to Ultra ATA/100. I thought that I was going to have to return my HD to googlegear.com and pay a 15% restocking fee!! But then I learned that this HD will work with my motherboard, but will only support transfer rates of 100 MB/s. My question is, should I buy a controller card that supports Ultra ATA/133 and attach my HD to that? Will that make the transfer rate faster, even though my motherboard doesn't support ATA/133? If so, how much should I spend? I believe that I saw one for 50 bucks. Thanks

 

[soulm4tter]

No you don't need one, it won't make any difference.

 

[Daovonnaex]

No, you should not. No ATA hard drive in existence can even make full use of ATA-4 (UDMA-66), most barely even make use of ATA-3 (UDMA-33).

 

[VBboy]

You guys are both wrong, somewhat.

Burst transfter speed of 133 MB/sec is very achievable when the drive's cache has the data. 133 MB/s is to/from the drive's interface to the IDE controller. Of course it probably won't even read 25 MB from the disk surface, but this will still give you a bump in certain applications.

You will probably see 10% speed improvement in all cases, maybe 15% or so in some...

 

[soulm4tter]

VBboy: When you say you'll see a speed improvement of 10-15%, are you speaking of read burst speed or what? A 10-15% increase in read burst speed from 90mb/s to 100mb/s will corrleate into exactly no noticeable increase in performance by the end user.

Dao: You system rig says you have a P4 on an Abit KG7-II. I thought the KG7 was an AMD760 Socket A board for Athlons. You sure you don't mean the Abit TH7-II?

 

[Seeko]

Sustained transfer rate (STR) is more important than read burst speed (RBS) when it comes to hard drive performance. You will notice an increase in STR whereas you may or may not notice an increase in RBS (in real world performance). STR in today's hard drives (IDE)doesn't even come close to 66mb/s let alone 100 mb/s. Save the $50 and put it towards a larger hard drive or more memory.

 

[Daovonnaex]

<< VBboy: When you say you'll see a speed improvement of 10-15%, are you speaking of read burst speed or what? A 10-15% increase in read burst speed from 90mb/s to 100mb/s will corrleate into exactly no noticeable increase in performance by the end user.

Dao: You system rig says you have a P4 on an Abit KG7-II. I thought the KG7 was an AMD760 Socket A board for Athlons. You sure you don't mean the Abit TH7-II? >>

Damn...they've found me...
Thanks, I'll fix my gaffe.

 

[soulm4tter]

Dao: lol, now it says Abit TG7-II RAID. Thats very close as the G key is adjacent to the H key. For some reason i can't private message you.

 

[Daovonnaex]

<< Dao: lol, now it says Abit TG7-II RAID. Thats very close as the G key is adjacent to the H key. For some reason i can't private message you. >>

Goddamn it...and I wrote down Caviar next to my WD1000. That's very retarded of me.
Edit: I enabled PMs.

 

[StanTheMan]

you can get it, and it is going to be useful, as long as ur motherboard doesn't use via chipset.
via crappy chipset (back from mvp3 up to the latest one) had trouble in handling pci burst data transfer.
I gues that explain why they also had problem with sb live card.
damn via!

 

[cool]

<< You guys are both wrong, somewhat.

Burst transfter speed of 133 MB/sec is very achievable when the drive's cache has the data. 133 MB/s is to/from the drive's interface to the IDE controller. Of course it probably won't even read 25 MB from the disk surface, but this will still give you a bump in certain applications.

You will probably see 10% speed improvement in all cases, maybe 15% or so in some... >>



You're right but the data must go from the IDE Controller to RAM through the oh-so-fast PCI bus and you'll never have a burst rate of 133MB/s (which is the PCIs max) because there's the soundcard, NIC etc. plus all the other technical stuff (I don't know of... )like latency etc. which brings the busrt rate down to 100MB/s or even less...

 

[ChefJoe]

You have to go Uber Raid-0 to use more than ATA-100. Raid-0 with to HD's falls somewhere between 33 and 66 depending on what HD's you're using. I wouldn't sweat it.