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Hard Drive Performance - ATA100 vs ATA133

Posted by Hemos on from the where-to-plunk-yer-cash dept.

Tweaker writes "A short visual guide to the performance advantages of ATA133 over ATA100. Synthetic and real-world benchmarks are also included."

9 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. No shock by supercytro · · Score: 4, Informative

    It comes as little surprise that there is negliible performance difference between ATA100 and ATA133. The nomenclature seems to imply superiority i.e. it's 33% better! but is no more credible than Intel 's advertising push of MHz as a comparator. There is an interesting line in the conclusionn tho, which says "Keep that main idea behind ATA133 is minimise bottlenecks in the system when your running MORE than one drive, and to allow manufacturers to build drives larger than 120GB" but even this advantage isn't generally realised.

  2. ATA133 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hey, cool comparison but I feel it overlooked the real reasons behind the move to ATA133.
    ATA133 isn't special because it will make hard drives faster. It's special because it will keep the interface from being a limiting factor in your hard drive performance. That would be criminal.

    IDE hard drives are pushing the 50mb/s mark. If one should place two of them on a channel and run intense I/O on both you can come fairly close to the 100mb/s barrier imposed by the interface. ATA133 obviously offers an additional 33mb/s of growing room for hard drive performance, which would be crucial for *future* hard drives. Why would a company spend money on R&D for creating a newer faster hard drive if it would not be able to perform any faster than what what's already on the market due to an interface limitation?
    ATA133 aleviates another barrier of ATA100 that the IDE drive manufacturers have already begun to run into: The 120gb limit. There are currently 160gb IDE drives on the market, and if one should only have an ATA100 controller in their box they would be losing 40gb. That's no good at all.

    I hope this is received ok. I'm not trying to be cynical or rude. I could just imagine somebody skimming the comparison and then deciding based upon it that they shouldn't worry about ATA133 being an included feature in a new motherboard purchase, which is a decision they may regret in the not too distant future.

    1. Re:ATA133 by Zathrus · · Score: 5, Informative

      Ok, after having done more research than I thought would be necessary...

      Most "ATA/100" systems aren't implementing ATAPI-6. They're implementing ATAPI-5 with an extention that includes UltraDMA Mode 5. ATAPI-6 does have 48-bit addressing, and Maxtor has implemented an extention that adds UltraDMA Mode 6 (aka ATA/133).

      Note that ATAPI-5 is the current official standard. ATAPI-6 is _not_ yet official. See the Technical Committee T13 website for details. Another good reference is ATA-ATAPI.com, along with PC Guide ATA standards.

      The net effect here is don't confuse the physical interface (ATAPI) with the network interface (UltraDMA). Yes, nitpick at the terms, but that's what it boils down to. Your "ATA/100" motherboard does not support 48-bit addresing.

      I agree, however, on the crappy design, the marketing blurbishness, the projection of HD speeds, and your recommendation about not running out and buying a 133 adaptor.

    2. Re:ATA133 by Rolo+Tomasi · · Score: 2, Informative
      Well ... with an ATA 100 controller you meet the hardware requirements for LBA48. My Asus P4T has ATA-100 and supports LBA48. LBA48 is part of the ATAPI-6 standard, as is acoustic management, both of which almost all of the current ATA 100 controllers support. ATAPI-6 is not yet ANSI certified, but that has never kept people from using anything. ATAPI (AT Attachment Packet Interface) is actually a protocol to send SCSI-like commands over the (physical) IDE (now UltraDMA) interface, so it's mostly a software issue, except that you need a few extra registers in the controller for LBA48. UltraDMA is a physical interface that is much like IDE, but with improved error correction and using both the rising and falling edge of the signal to transfer data (like DDR). The faster UltraDMA modes then just have higher clockspeeds.

      So UltraDMA==physical interface; ATAPI==Protocol.

      It's all a big kludge, really. I can't believe SCSI is dying.

      --
      Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
  3. Rotating media by yerricde · · Score: 2, Informative

    Perhaps it is simple a case of the technology being too young to actually realize the 33% expected increase in performance

    The sustained transfer rate of a hard disk cannot exceed the amount of data per cylinder times the rotation speed of the platter. In addition, HD designers are not easily going to overcome the fact that it takes a while to move the head from the inside to the outside of the platter.

    --
    Will I retire or break 10K?
  4. Re:Bottleneck must be elsewhere by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    You think memory bandwidth is going to be a bottleneck over hard drive speed? EARTH TO RETARD: hard drives can't come close to filling the bandwidth available to them by modern controllers. Hell, you'll see the same speeds on an ATA66 controller if a drive is only going to put out 37 MB/s to begin with. Gimme a break.

  5. Say PCI bottleneck! by Gruturo · · Score: 5, Informative

    Maybe we're forgetting that the "normal" (32bit, 33Mhz) PCI Bus has a total bandwidth of (32 bits = 4bytes) * (33Mhz) = 132 Mbytes/second.

    Now, this is the total BUS bandwidth, with 2 EIDE channels and all the other PCI stuff you've got on the 'puter sharing this resource. Luckily, AGP cards don't have to share that same bandwidth, but, heck, how can you even hope to get close to 133Mbytes/second from your hard drive(s) on such a bus, even if they could (and they can't) actually spew out that much data?

    Until they start designing southbridges with multiple PCI busses and the embedded EIDE attached to one of those, all of this is plainly pointless. Many really high-end chipsets as ServerWorks' already do this, but they cost so much that in that case you'd go for a SCSI subsystem anyway :-)

    Much more welcome is the ability to overcome the 120GB limit, instead.

    --

    Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
    1. Re:Say PCI bottleneck! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative
      The link from the southbridge (which hosts the PCI controller) and the northbridge is 266MB/s in VIA chipsets, going up to 533MB/s this year, 266MB/s in Intel chipsets, going up to 533MB/s this year, 800MB/s in nVidia chipsets, 533MB/s in SiS chipsets (1GB/s in their single chip chipsets).

      Southbridges are no longer PCI devices themselves. They are more an extension of the northbridge itself, with an interconnect to allow two separate physical chips to be used.

      What you wrote is correct a year or two ago when the southbridge was simply a PCI device sharing the bandwidth.

  6. Re:Digital Audio benchmark by EddydaSquige · · Score: 2, Informative
    Actually many photoshop users do care about disk speed. Photoshop is a huge memory hog and its own virtual memory system (adobe calls it the scratch disk). It's recomended that if your going to be working on large PS files that you have a minimum of 2 Gb scratch and I know many people (including myself) who swear by 10Gb. That's a 10 Gb partition, kept clean and only used by PS.

    The faster your scratch disk is, the less time PS spends pageing, this can add up to over a 30 second savings on complex filters or actions. Check out barefeats.com for benchmark tests related to graphics a video programs.