Has ATA 133 been broadly adopted

[Russell Campbell]

I've got a situation where I'm having a bit of trouble finding a motherboard
with IDE controllers that handle ATA 133 drives. I see a lot that are ATA
100, but not many at 133. I bought an ASUS P4P800 Deluxe motherboard that I
thought would handle my 133 drives, but it doesn't seem to work as
advertised. The 133 controller is the VIA VT6410 and though the manual
states that a drive connected to it that is not part of an array will work
as a 133 drive, I can't get the drive to show up in the regular BIOS, nor
can I get the Win 2K install program to see it. The regular IDE controllers
on the board only rate ATA 100. So why isn't 133 more widely adopted? I'd
like to get the full speed out of the drive, of course.

Thanks,

Russell Campbell

 

[V W Wall]

I've got a situation where I'm having a bit of trouble finding a motherboard
with IDE controllers that handle ATA 133 drives. I see a lot that are ATA
100, but not many at 133. I bought an ASUS P4P800 Deluxe motherboard that I
thought would handle my 133 drives, but it doesn't seem to work as
advertised. The 133 controller is the VIA VT6410 and though the manual
states that a drive connected to it that is not part of an array will work
as a 133 drive, I can't get the drive to show up in the regular BIOS, nor
can I get the Win 2K install program to see it. The regular IDE controllers
on the board only rate ATA 100. So why isn't 133 more widely adopted? I'd
like to get the full speed out of the drive, of course.

The fastest IDE drives cannot saturate the ATA100 connection. ATA133 is
more of a marketing hype than a useful specification. SATA1 will run at
150--lets hope someone will come up with a drive that can use it.

Virg Wall

 

[Russell Campbell]

Just to be sure -- <g> -- can you provide some more details? An article,
link, whatever. I'd be glad to plug my ATA 133 drive into the ATA 100
controller if I knew I wasn't sacrificing speed. Especially since the
drivers for the VIA VT6410 controller have caused my server to not shut down
properly and since I'm hearing bad things about VIA (wish I had researched
them before I purchased the motherboard).

 

[Russell Campbell]

Well, nevermind on the articles. I found some and one said that a 133
controller would perform better when more than one drive is attached.
Otherwise, you won't tax the ATA 100 controller. They did say to use an 80
core (40 pin) cable or the drives would drop to ATA 33 speed (yikes!!). I
do have more than one drive attached, but I can split those across the two
ATA 100 controllers, with the CD being a slave on one of them. It appears I
may not want to use that VIA controller at all. I'm just finding more and
more that indicates it's crap. Still wondering if I should just try to
return the motherboard, but what a pain that is and if everything else is
satisfactory, I'll tend to just chalk it up as a lesson learned.

Thanks for your reply.

 

[stacey]

Just to be sure -- <g> -- can you provide some more details? An article,
link, whatever. I'd be glad to plug my ATA 133 drive into the ATA 100
controller if I knew I wasn't sacrificing speed.

You won't lose ANY speed. You'll be lucky to get 50MBs out of any IDE drive
and that's half what ata100 can handle. ATA133 was/is marketing hype as is
sata as far as throughput performance.

Especially since the
drivers for the VIA VT6410 controller have caused my server to not shut
down properly and since I'm hearing bad things about VIA (wish I had
researched them before I purchased the motherboard).

Just disable the via raid chip in the bios, connect the drives to the ata100
conections, do the required ata100 registry patch and enable DMA in the
bios in win2K and you'll be MUCH better off performancewise over using that
CRAP Via raid chip on that board. It causes seriously high CPU usage.

I have the regular P4P800 and to use non-XP OS's you have to enable
"compatability" mode and pick which conections you want to use. I picked
"IDE only" (no sata) but have no idea if the deluxe is the same?

 

[stacey]

Well, nevermind on the articles. I found some and one said that a 133
controller would perform better when more than one drive is attached.
Otherwise, you won't tax the ATA 100 controller.

They are probably talking about a raid 0 ata100 controller with stupid fast
drives in raid 0 you -might- be getting -close- to saturating it. Seriously
don't worry about it and DO NOT use the via raid controller!!! I hope you
can disable it in the bios?

 

[Alceryes]

do have more than one drive attached, but I can split those across the two

ATA 100 controllers, with the CD being a slave on one of them.

Side note here -
Don't put 2 drives on the same channel that you are going to be
transferring large amounts of data between. By it's architecture a parallel
IDE interface can only execute one command (read or write) to one channel at
one time while this is happening the other drive can't do anything.
Example - A hard drive and a CD-rom drive on the same channel will install a
program (CD to HD install) slower then a hard drive and CD-rom on separate
channel.

 

[Russell Campbell]

Thanks, Stacey. ASUS seems to be well thought of, but these VIA chips seem
to have a bad rep. I think they are hurting themselves if they continue
down that path. But I noticed AOpen motherboards use them, too.

 

[Russell Campbell]

Here's page 5 of the article I mentioned:

http://www.tecchannel.de/hardware/850/5.html

And here's the key quote from that page:

"So just on the basis of the figures it is proved that using an
Ultra-ATA/133 controller - even if it is used as RAID-0 - only is worthwhile
if you run more than two disks."

I think I will disable the RAID controller.

 

[Russell Campbell]

Thanks for that. I will have the boot drive (60 MB Maxtor) on IDE 1 and the
other drive (160 MB Maxtor) on IDE 2. The question will be where to put the
CD drive. Probably on IDE 1, since I'll be using the CD to burn backups
from data that will mostly reside on the larger drive which will be on IDE
2.

 

[Vanguard]

I've got a situation where I'm having a bit of trouble finding a
motherboard with IDE controllers that handle ATA 133 drives. I see a
lot that are ATA 100, but not many at 133. I bought an ASUS P4P800
Deluxe motherboard that I thought would handle my 133 drives, but it
doesn't seem to work as advertised. The 133 controller is the VIA
VT6410 and though the manual states that a drive connected to it that
is not part of an array will work as a 133 drive, I can't get the
drive to show up in the regular BIOS, nor can I get the Win 2K
install program to see it. The regular IDE controllers on the board
only rate ATA 100. So why isn't 133 more widely adopted? I'd like
to get the full speed out of the drive, of course.

Thanks,

Russell Campbell

You won't get the full rated ATA-133 speed of the drive. That's
marketing hype (i.e., they LIED!). 50 MB/s is about the top bandwidth
for hard drives whether ATA 66, 100, or 133. See: http://snurl.com/31ln.
I thought there was a more applicable article at tomshardware.com but
can't find it regarding saturation of the PCI bus and that you get very
little boost from ATA-66 to ATA-100, if any, and that ATA-133 was a
waste of money.

Don't expect Serial ATA to give you a speed boost. It's marketing hype
for a new technology that has the *potential* of providing faster
speeds; see http://snurl.com/31ld and http://snurl.com/31mg. The
article is over a year old so there may have been improvements since
then (but those would have to be at the controller end), but even more
recent articles like http://snurl.com/31md show improvements are coming
but SATA is not a serious choice right now (because you'll have to
replace hardware later, anyway, so wait until then). Articles like
http://snurl.com/31ma show that RAID using SATA can provide high
bandwidth but you're talking about spending hundreds for a decent
hardware interface. A skinny SATA cable sure helps airflow but you can
now get round IDE cables, too.

You can get higher bandwidth by using RAID [striping]; see
http://snurl.com/31kh. You distribute the traffic over multiple IDE
channels. If you're using Windows 2000/XP, you can even use software
RAID (so you don't have to buy a RAID controller unless you want to
spread the drives out over more IDE channels) but unfortunately you
cannot include the partition/drive for the OS itself; see
http://snurl.com/31ko. With RAID, 3 drives, and 3 IDE channels, you can
get the full bandwidth of the PCI bus. But do you have any applications
that slam the drives that hard? You could waste a lot of time upping
the *potential* of your storage subsystem but never actually get close.