ah-nold fan wrote:
> I have an Intel motherboard with the 865 chipset. For
> some reason, Intel doesn't support the ATA-133 interface,
> only the 100 and 66.
>
> I overlooked this part when I bought my hard drive and
> cables. I bought an ATA-133 hard drive and ATA-133
> cables.
>
> So far, it is working. It seems to be backwards
> compatible. Things seem a little slower than they used to
> be though. Most noticeably from my CD-RW/DVD drive. It's
> 52x32.52/16x and the transfer speeds seem noticeably
> slower than in my old system with older parts. Shouldn't
> be happening I think.
>
> The plan is to eventually use the ATA-133 Hard Drive for
> extra storage and hook up a S-ATA drive for my OS and
> applications.
>
> My question is, is there a difference in the cabling that
> would slow down transfers with mismatched interfaces?
> ESPECIALLY from my CD drive. Anybody experienced
> something like this?
>
> Yes, I am writing this before I've tried different
> cables, but I'm sitting here at work kind of hoping to
> get some input.
>
> Thanks in advance
You do not have a mismatched interface. The MB will do transfers
to each IDE device at the best speed allowed by the combination of
device/cable/chipset: U/100 for the HD, and (probably) U/66 for
the CD/DVD.
There are only two speeds of IDE cable: a 40-wire cable for U/33 and
slower, and an 80-wire cable for any speed. No need to swap cables,
unless you suspect that your cable is defective.
There will be no difference in performance with a U/133 HD whether
using a U/133 chipset or a U/100 chipset, because the best any single
IDE HD can do is <70 MB/s STR. Hence, the IDE bus speed is not a
bottleneck for any single HD.
Most CDs and DVDs top out a U/66, so there will be no difference in
performance caused by parking it on a U/100 instead of a U/133 MB.
If you only have two IDE devices, a HD and a CD/DVD, you may be
better off parking each on its own IDE cable.
If you suspect your CD is running slowly, find one of the benchmarks
for CDs, such as CDspeed, and compare the measured performance with
the vendor's specs.
--
Cheers, Bob