Hard Drive Performance - ATA100 vs ATA133

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

Comments

ATA133

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:ATA133

[Zathrus]

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.

Say PCI bottleneck!

[Gruturo]

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.