Will I see much difference if I upgrade HD from ATA33 to ATA66?

[Sporko]

My current drive is a Maxtor 10GB 7200 rpm. Just wondering if I would see much improvement by upgrading.

 

[miniMUNCH]

Nope.

 

[StrangeRanger]

honestly, i saw a better performance increase when going from 5400rpm to 7200rpm than from ata33 to ata66
j

 

[Wah]

no

 

[kami]

not for that drive, but for a drive like mine (Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 45), it would be worth it since the drive can reach the 33MB/sec in normal transfers, not just burst rates.

 

[Moving Target]

I agree totaly with StrangeRanger.

 

[Noriaki]

by upgrading what?

That maxtor drive is probably about 5gig/s platter first generation 7200rpm...if you upgrade to a DMax+45 or a 75GXP 2nd or 3rd gen 15gig/platter drive yeah it'll be faster.

But the ATA33 vs ATA66 makes very little difference...there are a few very new hard drives that can sustatin 33MB/s or slightly more, so if you have anything else on that channel with it ATA66 would help (ATA100 is next to useless right now) however your drive is probably fairly old so it won't come near the 33MB/s so it won't really help that drive moving up to ATA66.

If you mean a newer hard drive...well maybe...but I doubt it.

I went from a WD Expert 7200rpm 9.1gig (probably similar stats to your maxtor) to an IBM 75GXP (fastest IDE hard drive around) and I honestly didn't notice much difference.
The biggest factor in most normal use is seek time, rotational latency (the first part of seek time) is based solely on RPM. Track seek time is based on a bunch of little things none of which are commonly thrown around things like RPM or Gigs or Gigs/platter much less ATA##....the actuator is probably pretty similar in that maxtor drive to any newer ones, seek times really haven't imporved much in the last couple years in IDE drives...and as I said Rotational Latency is based soley on RPM, and there are no IDE drives with higher than 7200rpm.
All in all...if you are running out of space upgrade to a newer drive, but I honestly doubt you'll notice much performance difference, especially with 192MB of RAM win9x at least won't use much Vmem.