Ultra ATA or Ultra DMA?

[vaporize]

Is Ultra ATA better than DMA? I think I will return my DMA and get the ATA hard drive. Whats the difference and which one is better?

and one of my friends told me that i should get 2 hard drives for a gaming computer. so that i can have the operating system on one and the games on the other. he said it would improve performance of the game since the computer will be able to access both the OS and the game files at the same time. is this true?

 

[Pariah]

All current hard drives are known as Ultra ATA drives that transfer data using Ultra DMA modes.

2 drives are better than one, but it's not worth buying a second drive for that purpose alone if you are a gamer. The performance benefit would be practically nill in such applications.

 

[Jeff7]

Same difference.
If you get ATA/100, that'll be fine (DMA/100, DMA level 5, same thing). If you're comparing two different hard drives, and the ONLY difference is the interface - ATA/100 vs ATA/133 - well, there won't be a difference. Hard drives themselves can't read data off of the internal platters that fast anyway. I think that to be rated as ATA/100/133, the drive must be able to burst data at that speed for only a tiny fraction of a second. Look more at the cache (8MB is better than the usual 2MB) and rotational speed (higher is better; 7200rpms is pretty common).
Using 2 drives instead of one just for games - I agree with Pariah here. The difference will be minimal; it won't affect framerates one bit, and it might improve loading times very slightly. RAID 0 might improve loading times moreso, but still, it'll only save a few seconds at the start, and maybe when loading new levels in the game.