Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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.

3 of 344 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

  2. 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

  3. 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