Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

3 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. Effort outweighs the gains by jason99si · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. Two Problems With This Test... by Handover+Slashdot · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:There's no comparison by Cramer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.