IDE ATA/133 controller card

[Timothy Daniels]

Does anyone have a preference based on experience between
the Promise UltraTX2 and the SIIG UltraATA133 controller
cards?

Is there any advantage to having 256-byte FIFO buffers that
SIIG has rather than 128-byte FIFO buffers that Promise has?

See:
http://www.siig.com/products/ide/specs/UltraATA133PCIv2_S.html


*TimDaniels*

 

[Will Dormann]

Does anyone have a preference based on experience between
the Promise UltraTX2 and the SIIG UltraATA133 controller
cards?

My motherboard (GA-7DXR+) has an onboard Promise controller (PDC20276).
I tried it in ATA133 mode, and while it did benchmark fast, under
heavy disk activity the mouse would be jerky and my audio would become
choppy. Switched back to my onboard ATA100 controller and everything
was fine again.

I hear that there are some Promise driver versions that are broken like
that, but I never did look into it further.

-WD

 

[Stacey]

Does anyone have a preference based on experience between
the Promise UltraTX2 and the SIIG UltraATA133 controller
cards?

Is there any advantage to having 256-byte FIFO buffers that
SIIG has rather than 128-byte FIFO buffers that Promise has?

I've had good results using the SIIG boards and heard people bitch about the
Promise drivers being flakey. I think maybe Promise is cruising along on
their name so I'd go with the SIIG.

 

[Randyman]

I've use the Promise UltraTX2 controller in an AMD and Intel system; no
problems. In the older AMD system (it was a FAT32 setup of Win XP - ask me
why ???FAT32 - dumb- that's why), I had two hard drives on the each channel
of the controller; it was after I added a HD to the second channel I noticed
a genuine slow down in the system -- don't know the reason, but it happened.
This system I'm using now I have HD's on the Primary on board IDE as master,
one on channel one of the promise controller, and one on a IDE Raid on-board
controller running as an ordinary IDE HD (non-raid). The system is based on
the Asus P4P800 dlx MB, and I expect to do lots of shuffling and moving hard
drives around in the future; I'll probably set up a SATA configuration for
Video processing. Things seem fast, but I just don't seem to be able to
overclock over 5%. Perhaps its my memory or all the devices I have
attached -- I don't know. I've had a bad crash after overclocking which
corrupted system files- bad news and hard to fix; another bad crash with a
Sun Java (tm) installation. I will post to the Asus group soon to tell
about the OC crash ordeal. Back to the controllers ---- I bought them OEM
from Newegg.

Good Luck ---------------Randyman