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ATA133 Controllers Have Arrived

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the bigger-faster-nifty-kean dept.

Spot writes "If you're a hardware junkie, then you may already know ATA133 is on it's way to becoming the new standard for drive controllers. LittleWhiteDog has a very detailed look into the Promise Ultra133 TX2 Controller and Maxtor's D740X-6L ATA133 interface drive. " And I just bought a few 100g drives :) I still find it funny that every couple years I buy new hard drives always for around $200... 120 megs, 800 megs, 2.5G, 12G, 30G, 100G. I love this.

12 of 344 comments (clear)

  1. SCSI by kawaichan · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Still rules for now, when will serial ATA will come out for the consumer market? seemed like a slick deal for me. As for ATA 133, it's just a holding tech until Serial ATA comes out (god knows when)

    --

    kawai
  2. They keep making ATA faster ... by jkujawa · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But they aren't doing anything to make it SUCK LESS. Drive platters aren't getting faster at the rate the controller is. Very few, if any, drives currently available can saturate an ATA33 bus, sustained. The only thing these ludicrous improvments are doing are increasing performance to and from the drive cache.

    Now that IDE has for all intents and purposes killed SCSI on the desktop, you'd think that they'd expend a little fucking engineering effort to make it so that you can control more than two drives on a controller, and so that a other devices on the chain can work while one is processing a command.

    I'm horrified at how IDE has flourished. It's the worst possible standard for a drive interface.

    1. Re:They keep making ATA faster ... by renoX · · Score: 2, Insightful

      > I'm horrified at how IDE has flourished. It's the worst possible standard for a drive interface.

      Now let's see, where I have seen this before?
      - 80x86 one of the worst ISA (braindead floating points ISA, too few registers, unduly complicated) won against all the other because it was cheaper.. IBM considered going with the 68000, but it was quite expensive..

      - Microsoft vs Apple: Windows won, they were cheaper and still able to get the job done..
      Who earns more money now?

      Do you see a trend here?

      As long as it get the job done, the cheapest technology will win, even if it is "ugly" from a technical point of view..

    2. Re:They keep making ATA faster ... by Trepidity · · Score: 3, Insightful

      First of all, starting off a comment with "No. Wrong." is so ridiculously juvenile as to barely warrant a response.

      Secondly, only one device can talk on an IDE bus at a time, but as you noted the drives can't push data fast enough to saturate it anyway. So with two drives, you have them continuously reading data off the disk into their caches and then alternately sending it on the bus. So yes, they don't talk concurrently on the bus, but they are concurrently reading off the disk. The end result is that you have the bus more saturated than before.

      --
      10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
  3. Re:The Cart before the Horse by psychalgia · · Score: 2, Insightful

    its one less bottleneck to conquer.

    --

    ________________________________________________

  4. Why ATA133? by abelsson · · Score: 5, Insightful
    You're missing the point - The reason to move to ATA133 isn't for the extra speed - i doubt many people care about it: ATA133's main benefit is that it gets around the 28bit addressing in the previous versions that only allowed harddrives to be max 137GB. Hopefully the petabytes offered by ATA133 will last a while.

    -henrik

  5. PCI Standards by singularity · · Score: 3, Insightful

    From the article: "The TX2 is the first Ultra ATA133 controller card that has support for 66MHz PCI motherboards (32-bit @ 66MHz as opposed to the current 32-bit @ 33MHz - not the same as 64-bit @ 33MHz). Granted there are no 32-bit 66MHz PCI motherboards available at this point in time (they'll be here "when they're done") but when they are available this card will be able to take advantage of the extra hertz."

    It seems that we have two competing PCI slot standards - 64-bit/33MHz and 32-bit/66MHz. I assume that eventually we will see 64-bit/66MHz.

    I remember an article from a few years ago talking about what the next step in PCI slots would be, and it spoke to these two steps. The argument against 64-bit slots was that it would have to change the physical dimensions of the slot to accomodate the additional bits being passed. The problem with 66MHz slots was cross-talk and RF interference between two adjacent slots.

    Since these new ATA/133 cards are backwards compatible with 33MHz slots, I must assume they found a way to reduce RF interference. The existence of 64-bit PCI slots means that industry has found a way to move 64-bits using the older physical architecture.

    That said, which of the standards do Slashdot readers think will catch on? Or will the two compete until a 64-bit/66Mhz standard is agreed upon?

    --
    - (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
  6. Re:Oh, to be cheap and unemployed! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    2 gigs? I'll never fill that up! :)

    i wish more companies made drives like this. when building firewalls, i don't need a 20G drive, i need less than 1G 98% of the time

    problem is to get a 2G drive, you have to pay like $200, and it'll probably fail in 2 days anyways

  7. Does Maxtor have ATA133 patented? by zsazsa · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Looking at the specs on the linked article:

    New Ultra ATA interface with Maxtor-patented Ultra ATA/133 protocol supporting burst data transfer rates of 133MB/s.

    Maxtor-patented? I hope this is a typo or editing mistake. Looking around at http://www.uspto.gov/ doesn't reveal much, but Googling for information brings up a few press releases saying things such as "Ultra ATA/133 Is Based on Maxtor Patented ATA Technology" and "The Fast Drives specification and licensing rights for Ultra ATA/133 are available from Maxtor under non-disclosure."

    Are other ATA standards patented like this, by Maxtor or other companies like Western Digital or Seagate?

    Ian

  8. Forget about it! by dark&stormynight · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Don't waste your money on this level of technology. I'm waiting for the Serial ATA to come out next year!

  9. Great... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Now my IDE drive interface can be A FULL ORDER OF MAGNITUDE faster than any IDE drives I can buy.

    How about updating the spec to allow more than two drives per channel? Then we might actually have a chance of saturating it.

  10. The quietest drive I have ever heard (or not heard by mj · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I recently purchased that Maxtor drive, thinking I was getting an ATA/100 drive, and was pleasantly surprised to find out I'd have a drive that my controller may someday catch up with... :)

    But the really great thing about this drive, is that its the single quietest drive I have seen.
    Its phenominal!!!

    For those of you that care about a quiet PC, I hightly recommend this drive.