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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."
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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.
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.
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.
Slap a type-R sticker on your drive. I did it, and I swear I got an extra MB/sec out of my ATA/100.
I'm thinking of putting a spoiler on it. I figure that's good for at least 850KB/sec. Any recommendations?
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.
How many ATA drives out there actually get anywhere near 133MB/s sustained transfer rates from the media? Any even able to sustain half of that? Not that I've seen.
For ATA, it's hype.
Someone might argue that it is good for RAID, which would be true for SCSI. But RAID 0 for example with two drives on the same ATA bus gives terrible performance due to the time taken to switch between ATA master and slave drives. So it really comes down to what an ATA drive can sustain.
Sure it's nice to have the fast bus in place for the future, but by then, you've probably already upgraded to something much faster still.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
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.
No, the bottleneck is the drives.
The fastest IDE on the market is still only spinning at 7200 rpm. Maximum transfer rate is going to vary depending on the media density at the outermost track on the drive, but in general it's still not going to approach 133 MB/s. Most IDE drives have sustained data transfer rates in the 50 MB/s range (the Maxtor D740X, which is one of the most popular IDE drives on the market currently, has a sustained transfer rate of only 44.4 MB/s at the outer diameter and 24.2 at the inner, as per Maxtor's own tech sheet).
If you read the literature from Maxtor, who designed this standard, even they will admit that the maximum transfer rate will only occur on a read from cache - and the biggest cache on an IDE drive is a whopping 8 MB. So congrats on sustaining that maximum transfer rate for all of 60 ms. After that you're back to reading from disk.
The only real advantage of ATA133 is to support drives >120GB. Of course, the funny thing is that the only 160GB drive available right now is a mere 5400 RPM (with a lovely 35.9 MB/s at outer diameter).
ATA133 is widely regarded as a marketing gimick. Apparantly it's working though, since some people actually think it matters.
ATA100: ***
ATA133: ****
*=33
Any questions?
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
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.