Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
This story hits far too close to home as I just spent the last two evenings attempting to install my Promise ATA/133 card, along with my new Maxtor 160gb drive.. and a new install of Windows. Although I had the most recent drivers, and specified them on install, Windows XPlod could not manage to complete an installation without a hard freeze, blue screen, or other nonsense. I tried with Linux, but only managed to lose my MP3 collection on my other drive. Windows 2000 finally did go.
I'm convinced that even if it yielded a 20% increase in performance it wouldn't be worth complicating my install, my boot time, my lack of slots on my board, etc.
Meanwhile, my lawn has grown out of control, and the trash is starting to stink from me neglecting my other tasks. My advice, ditch the controller for ATA133, and live your life.
I'd be more interested in the RAID capabilities of the motherboard than the upgrade from ATA100 to ATA133. Besides, hard drives are so much faster than CD-ROM drives that they are all pretty much the same. I actually got a "faster" ATA100 hard drive (60 GB) that goes slower in real life than my old ATA66 20 GB hard drive. 1) benchmarks don't always reflect real life 2) speed doesn't really matter with hard drives since they're so fast anyway.
The biggest reasons for faster drivers (other than running a file server) would be digital audio and offline graphics rendering. They should show benchmarks on that. There's utilities that tell you, for example, how many audio tracks you can read/write at one time. Comparison to SCSI would be nice, too, since IDE should be a cheap alternative to SCSI for desktop audio users (because SCSI shines with multiple reads, which you don't really need when you want one app to have max. bandwidth to the disk)
I can't imagine that John Q. Photoshop user cares about disk speed; cpu speed is probably more the issue for that.
http://www.naildrivin5.com/davec
sure there is a bottleneck it's the HDD speed, it isn't even close to saturating ATA100, in fact ATA66 would be enough.
One, the main bottleneck in HD's is not the external transfer, but the internal transfer. Even the best current IDE drives only transfer data at about 60-70 mb/sec, making ATA 100 mare than sufficient. Two, the only drive he used in this test was a Maxtor, which is far slower than that (they do about 52-54 mb/sec.) Maxtor is the only major current supporter of the 133 standard, and there may be a reason for that. Try putting the 133 Maxtor up against the Western Digital WD1200JB (currently the fastest IDE HD on the market due to 8mb cache) and see how it fares.
No, the bottleneck is the same as it's been the last 5-10 years. You cant get better performance reading and writing to disk as long as you dont have better performance between the platter and the head of the drive. You can get a ATA500 bus and it wont make any difference as long as you cant read faster off the disk. You have to get faster disks (try a 15k rpm disk for example).
For SCSI the bus speed can make more of a difference since you can have more devices per bus. But with IDE's pitiful 2 devices the bus doesnt really make a difference for any OS that has a memory FS cache already (which will usually sequence reads and writes enough that the disks own buffer doesnt matter much (which is the only thing you're getting more speed against with a faster bus)).
If your running windows (NT or 2k), the bottle neck is the OS.
The NT microkernel was designed serialize all IDE device access in the drivers.
Therefore, if multiple processes are attempting concurrent IDE subsystem access, each data transfer request will run to completion.
It actually makes no difference if the processes are attempting access to different physical devices, because it is the NT driver layer that enforces this restriction.
This is especially bad for an OS that relies on a page/swap file residing on a shared resource.
Only viable solution for concurrent access: use only SCSI devices.
Servers use SCSI because they need to be able to queue multiple commands to the drive (read: multi-user environment.) Add to that the quality and lifespan of your agerage SCSI drive, and the price is well worth it.
Sitting right here with my dual PIII-800 IDE (ATA100) feed W2k box, IDE works just fine as long as there's only one thing playing with the disk. When the index engine fires up, the box is no longer usable. (It's actually very annoying.) On the dual PII-450 SCSI (U2) feed W2k box, I cannot tell when the indexer is running.