bobbyb0y said:
I'm building a system with the following parts:
ASUS P4P800 Deluxe - mobo
Intel Pentium4 2.6 GHz HT - chip
1x 512 GB DDR 400 Mhz - RAM (by Geil)
ATI 9600 XT 128 MB - graphics
Maxtor 120 GB Ultra ATA 133 - HDD
My question is where do I connect the HDD ribbon cable on the said
mobo?
Its not clear to me if this mobo supports Ultra ATA 133 in full
speed? ie, at '133'.
Do I have to buy an Ultra ATA 133 pci type cards?
-thanks
I think the most logical place to plug the hard drive into is as the master
drive on the primary IDE channel. As you surmise, you will "only" get
ATA-100 performance from this channel, but that is close enough that I think
buying an Ultra ATA-133 card would be a waste of money. My guess is that if
you put the drive on one of the Via RAID channels, your throughput will not
improve. The Via controller has been criticized in some postings and
reviews as a bit sluggish in certain applications.
If you are running Windows 2K or XP, another option would be to purchase an
additional drive, with the fastest choice a WD Raptor 37GB SATA drive. You
could use that as your system drive, which would run at (hopefully) 150 (vs.
100) plus there would be the added performance from the 10,000 RPM
rotational speed. You could use the ATA Maxtor drive for additional storage
off the Primary IDE channel. I've seen these 37GB Raptors for sale in the
$110 to $120 range at Newegg and Zipzoomfly. Granted, this is expensive for
the amount of storage, but reading the reviews I have the impression that
most Raptor purchasers are pleased with their purchase. This expenditure
would almost certainly speed up your system considerably, whereas the IDE
133 card would probably not produce observable improvement.
Good luck,
ken
