ATA-133 and ATA-100

[ah-nold fan]

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

 

[Bob Willard]

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.

 

[Bob Willard]

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.

 

[Kenny S]

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.

so ATA 133 is good only if you have 2 hard disks on the same IDE channel?
If you do have 2, will you see a significant change, or will you see the
improvment only if both hard drives are writing - reading at the same time?

What about SERIAL ata? It has 150 mb/s transfer.... does that mean that it
usless?

--

Hope this helps. Let us know.
_____________
Kenny S
http://www.computerboom.net
FREE programs and MORE!

---

 

[Bob Willard]

so ATA 133 is good only if you have 2 hard disks on the same IDE channel?
If you do have 2, will you see a significant change, or will you see the
improvment only if both hard drives are writing - reading at the same time?

What about SERIAL ata? It has 150 mb/s transfer.... does that mean that it
usless?

You might see a difference in performance between a U/100 IDE and a
U/133 IDE with two HDs on that IDE, but only if your workload creates
and your OS supports asynchronous I/O. Even then, the actual gain
will be pretty small in most cases.

SATA is great, but not because 150>133; the fastest SATA HD currently
available has a STR of ~72 MB/s on the outer zone. SATA is better than
PATA because the cabling is better: longer and less likely to block
airflow. SATA is also better than PATA because TCQ will soon be
available to support higher throughput (IOs/sec); but, that is more
useful for servers than for standard WinDuhs clients.

 

[Yves Leclerc]

You will need to also install the Intel Application Accelerator utility.
Intel has created this utility for its UltraDMA driver. It is supposed to
be the drivers.

 

[Kenny S]

thanks for that information...

seems to me that serial ata has no great advantages for the time bieng.

--

Hope this helps. Let us know.
_____________
Kenny S
http://www.computerboom.net
FREE programs and MORE!

---