ATA 100 & ATA133

[Woodchuck]

I purchased a Maxtor 250g which includes their ATA133 PCI board. The
question is since my MB supports ATA100 is there much of a performance if I
don't use the Maxtor board? The new drive will be installed as "D" since
some of my software installed on "C" is registered and references to
something on the drive to run. I have tried to move the software to another
drive and it' will not run. The new drive will be used mainly for video
editing and so far I have had no issues with the present ATA100 drive. Just
needed more space...


TIA

 

[Will Dormann]

I purchased a Maxtor 250g which includes their ATA133 PCI board. The
question is since my MB supports ATA100 is there much of a performance if I
don't use the Maxtor board?

No, it'll work fine. Video editing work requires mostly a high
sustained transfer rate. The transfer rate for a single drive will be
well under the limit of the ATA100 interface.

-WD

 

[Rod Speed]

I purchased a Maxtor 250g which includes their ATA133 PCI
board. The question is since my MB supports ATA100 is there
much of a performance if I don't use the Maxtor board?

Nope, none.

The new drive will be installed as "D" since some of my
software installed on "C" is registered and references to
something on the drive to run. I have tried to move the
software to another drive and it' will not run.

You should be able to make the new drive the boot drive
if you want to do that. You just have to do it the right way.

The new drive will be used mainly for video editing
and so far I have had no issues with the present
ATA100 drive. Just needed more space...

And the PCI card will be limited by the PCI bus anyway.

One other consideration is support for drives over 137GB
tho. The motherboard bios may not have that, but can
often be flashed with the latest version to support that.

 

[Marc de Vries]

I purchased a Maxtor 250g which includes their ATA133 PCI board. The
question is since my MB supports ATA100 is there much of a performance if I
don't use the Maxtor board?

You won't notice any performance difference.

The main reason Maxtor included that pci board is because lots of
older mobo's didn't support disks of that size and this pci board
does.

You should check if your mobo supports disks larger then 137GB, or if
there is a bios update for the board that adds it. The term to look
for is "48 bit LBA addressing".

If the mobo doesn't support it you can use the ata133 pci board.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

No, it'll work fine.

Video editing work requires mostly a high sustained transfer rate.
Nonsense.

The transfer rate for a single drive will be
well under the limit of the ATA100 interface.

Actually, the single track transfer rate of some current drives may well
challenge that. With todays huge capacity drives a single track (or a cylinder)
may fit most (contiguous) files.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

I purchased a Maxtor 250g which includes their ATA133 PCI board.

The question is since my MB supports ATA100 is there much of a
performance hit if I don't use the Maxtor board?

Not with single (physical or logical) drive per channel usage.

 

[Z Man]

I purchased a Maxtor 250g which includes their ATA133 PCI board. The
question is since my MB supports ATA100 is there much of a performance if I
don't use the Maxtor board? The new drive will be installed as "D" since
some of my software installed on "C" is registered and references to
something on the drive to run. I have tried to move the software to another
drive and it' will not run. The new drive will be used mainly for video
editing and so far I have had no issues with the present ATA100 drive. Just
needed more space...

We've gone a few rounds on this subject matter in the
alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus newsgroup. That discussion relates to
theP4C800-E Deluxe motherboard, but it might apply to your question, as
well. That mb has onboard ATA100, and also a Promise RAID controller that
can be run as an ATA133 IDE host adapter (non-raid). I (and others) have run
benchmarks that have shown remarkable results. I'm going to cite mine below,
but if you wish to see the remaining posts in this thread, check into the
asus newsgroup.

XP Pro SP1 with 4GB PC2100 and P4-1600 (HD Tach 2.7):

Western Digital 200GB 8M cache boot drive on IDE port:

Random access: 13.8ms
Read burst speed: 28.1MB/s
Read speed average 26.4 MB/s
CPU Utilization: 5.3%

Maxtor 250GB 8M cache drive on Promise port (non-raid):

Random access: 14.3ms
Read burst speed: 106.1MB/s
Read speed average 50.3 MB/s
CPU Utilization: 5.4%

Seagate ST318452LW 15k on LSI Logic U/160:

Random access: 5.9ms
Read burst speed: 82.3MB/s
Read speed average 55.5MB/s
CPU Utilization: 5.9%

COMMENT: The difference between similar drives on the IDE and Promise
controllers is astonishing, almost hard to believe. Burst speed even exceeds
the 15k drive. Of course, no IDE can get close to a 15k hard drive for
random access.

I also have a Maxtor Atlas 15k 73GB hard drive, one of the world's fastest
drive's, to be installed (storagereview.com). This setup is for video
editing. A two hour avi exported from an 8MM tape is around 25GB, too large
for my Seagate 15k, thus, the Atlas.

 

[Rod Speed]

We've gone a few rounds on this subject matter in the
alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus newsgroup. That discussion
relates to theP4C800-E Deluxe motherboard, but it might apply
to your question, as well. That mb has onboard ATA100, and
also a Promise RAID controller that can be run as an ATA133
IDE host adapter (non-raid). I (and others) have run benchmarks
that have shown remarkable results. I'm going to cite mine
below, but if you wish to see the remaining posts in this
thread, check into the asus newsgroup.

XP Pro SP1 with 4GB PC2100 and P4-1600 (HD Tach 2.7):

Western Digital 200GB 8M cache boot drive on IDE port:

Random access: 13.8ms
Read burst speed: 28.1MB/s
Read speed average 26.4 MB/s
CPU Utilization: 5.3%

Maxtor 250GB 8M cache drive on Promise port (non-raid):

Random access: 14.3ms
Read burst speed: 106.1MB/s
Read speed average 50.3 MB/s
CPU Utilization: 5.4%

Those are pretty useless numbers. You'd have to
benchmark the reverse config before they show
anything much useful, and the numbers make no real
sense as far as JUST ATA100 and 133 is concerned.

Looks rather like the IDE port doesnt have the
best driver for the chipset being used if that half
read speed is seen with the reverse config too.

The only thing that makes any real sense for
him is to try both configs himself with HDTach.

Seagate ST318452LW 15k on LSI Logic U/160:

Random access: 5.9ms
Read burst speed: 82.3MB/s
Read speed average 55.5MB/s
CPU Utilization: 5.9%

COMMENT: The difference between similar drives on the IDE
and Promise controllers is astonishing, almost hard to believe.

Yep, makes no real sense so its an artifact.

Burst speed even exceeds the 15k drive.

And burst speed is essentially irrelevant for real world
work anyway and is likely just an inappropriate driver with
the IDE tests. The SCSI test is completely irrelevant.

Of course, no IDE can get close to
a 15k hard drive for random access.

Doesnt have a damned thing to do with
IDE either. Thats just the physical drive.

 

[Woodchuck]

I got a reply back from Gigabyte stating my MB(GA-8PE667) will see HD's over
the 137g as one drive. Next question, what is the typical continuous
transfer rates for today's ATA/ATA133 hard drives once you get past the
advertised "burst speed"?

 

[Marc de Vries]

I got a reply back from Gigabyte stating my MB(GA-8PE667) will see HD's over
the 137g as one drive. Next question, what is the typical continuous
transfer rates for today's ATA/ATA133 hard drives once you get past the
advertised "burst speed"?

A modern IDE 7200 rpm disk will usually reach 50 to 60MB/s max,
dropping down to something like 30MB/s max at the end of the disk.

You can find these numbers in every review on the net.

Which is usually plenty for videoediting. DV uses just 6MB/s
(that's not a typo. DV is just six MB/s. So even an single older IDE
disk can easily handle that)

I've heard that people with primitive editing software who don't use
the DV format, want higher transfer rate values, but I cannot confirm
that. They might just be uninformed.

In any case, your editing software supplier should also be able to
tell you what transfer rate values you need.

Marc

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

We've gone a few rounds on this subject matter in the
alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus newsgroup. That discussion relates to
theP4C800-E Deluxe motherboard, but it might apply to your question, as
well. That mb has onboard ATA100, and also a Promise RAID controller that
can be run as an ATA133 IDE host adapter (non-raid). I (and others) have run
benchmarks that have shown remarkable results. I'm going to cite mine below,
but if you wish to see the remaining posts in this thread, check into the
asus newsgroup.

XP Pro SP1 with 4GB PC2100 and P4-1600 (HD Tach 2.7):

Western Digital 200GB 8M cache boot drive on IDE port:

Random access: 13.8ms
Read burst speed: 28.1MB/s
Read speed average 26.4 MB/s
CPU Utilization: 5.3%

Most likely run with a 40 conductor cable.

Maxtor 250GB 8M cache drive on Promise port (non-raid):

Random access: 14.3ms
Read burst speed: 106.1MB/s
Read speed average 50.3 MB/s
CPU Utilization: 5.4%

Seagate ST318452LW 15k on LSI Logic U/160:

Random access: 5.9ms
Read burst speed: 82.3MB/s
Read speed average 55.5MB/s
CPU Utilization: 5.9%

COMMENT: The difference between similar drives on the IDE and Promise
controllers is astonishing, almost hard to believe.

So obviously something is wrong.

Burst speed even exceeds the 15k drive.

Problem is that it isn't the burst speed that is measured but a same sector
read from the drive and that what you see is cache behaviour, not bus speed.

 

[Rod Speed]

I got a reply back from Gigabyte stating my MB(GA-8PE667)
will see HD's over the 137g as one drive. Next question, what
is the typical continuous transfer rates for today's ATA/ATA133
hard drives once you get past the advertised "burst speed"?

That varys a lot depending on how the drive is used.

The best way to get a look at that is the reviews at storagereview etc
where the transfer rates are show in various types of disk activity.
It makes a very big difference if you are moving a very large file or if
the OS is doing quite a bit of disk activity in a multitasking environment.

Presumably what you care about is thruput with big video files.
There are various utes that measure that sort of thruput for
that rather unusual situation with personal desktop PCs.

The short story is that you're unlikely to see any difference
with that drive on the motherboard controller, even tho it
can only do ATA/100 max. The physical drive cant actually
do any better than that anyway and a PCI controller is
also limited by what the PCI bus can do too.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

And the PCI card will be limited by the PCI bus anyway.

Assuming that just one device is actually transferring data
to/from an ATA133 PCI controller card, can that controller
card actually be limited by the speed of the PCI channel?


*TimDaniels*

 

[Rod Speed]

Rod Speed wrote

Assuming that just one device is actually transferring data
to/from an ATA133 PCI controller card, can that controller
card actually be limited by the speed of the PCI channel?

Yep.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

I got a reply back from Gigabyte stating my MB(GA-8PE667) will see HD's
over the 137g as one drive. Next question, what is the typical continuous
transfer rates for today's ATA/ATA133 hard drives once you get past the

advertised "burst speed"?

They advertise burst speeds now?

 

[Eric Gisin]

Assuming that just one device is actually transferring data
to/from an ATA133 PCI controller card, can that controller
card actually be limited by the speed of the PCI channel?

There are typically 4-12 PCI devices sharing the bus. On typical desktop, it
is only hard drives that take a big chunk out of the 133MB/s total.

 

[Marc de Vries]

Yep.

What kind of limitation are you thinking about?

ATA133 only reaches 133MB/s when it reads the cache of the harddisk.
But for videoediting your files are usually a bit larger than 2Mb or
8MB, so you will have have speeds that are limited by the maximum
transfer rates of the disk itself which are in the range of 30MB/s to
60MB/s

32bit/33Mhz PCI gives a max of 132MB/s.
133MB/s vs 132MB/s doesn't sound like a severe limitation to me.

Unless the pci bus is already very busy with other tasks.
But when you are editing there is usually no other device that uses
any decent amount of pci bandwith.

But if you plan to download files from a giabit networkcard to another
harddisk while you are editing, you will definately see that
controller card be limited by the available bandwith on the PCI
channel

 

[Rod Speed]

What kind of limitation are you thinking about?

ATA133 only reaches 133MB/s when it reads the cache
of the harddisk. But for videoediting your files are usually
a bit larger than 2Mb or 8MB, so you will have have
speeds that are limited by the maximum transfer rates of
the disk itself which are in the range of 30MB/s to 60MB/s

Those are awfully crude numbers, particularly with PCI.

32bit/33Mhz PCI gives a max of 132MB/s.

Pity you dont know that thats the PCI he is talking about.

133MB/s vs 132MB/s doesn't sound
like a severe limitation to me.

Mindlessly superficial.

Unless the pci bus is already very busy with other tasks.
But when you are editing there is usually no other
device that uses any decent amount of pci bandwith.

Bullshit. And there is a CAN in Timmy's question.

But if you plan to download files from a giabit network
card to another harddisk while you are editing, you will
definately see that controller card be limited by the
available bandwith on the PCI channel

Which is why I answered yep to the CAN in his question.

 

[Woodchuck]

I got the drive(ATA133) today and was surprised to see it included
SATA/150PCI/Promise card which has connectors for ATA133 and SATA. Would I
see any advantage of using the card at this time or just wait until someday
if I ever invest in the newer SATA drive? I started a new thread about
replace the "C" drive which XP runs on. How does one transfer the info from
the old drive to a new drive.

 

[Rod Speed]

I got the drive(ATA133) today and was surprised to see it included
SATA/150PCI/Promise card which has connectors for ATA133 and SATA.

It is Xmas after all |-)

You must have been a good boy |-)

Would I see any advantage of using the card at this time

Not unless the motherboard bios doesnt support drives over 137GB.

or just wait until someday if I ever invest in the newer SATA drive?

Yeah, thats's what I'd do.

I started a new thread about replace the "C" drive which XP runs on.
How does one transfer the info from the old drive to a new drive.

Basically using any of the obvious drive copy programs like
ghost or drive image or the free www.xxclone.com and just
ensure that only the new drive is plugged in on the first XP
boot after the copy has been made. Once it has detected
the new drive and has asked for a reboot because of that,
you can plug the original back in again, usually as a slave,
and reformat it and use it for data etc.

It is generally best to boot off the newest drive
because its normally the fastest drive in the system.