Can a new HD work with an UDMA/33 mobo???

[Kryogen]

Friend has an old pentium 3 with an udma/33 mobo. Theres a 10 gig hd on it. He wants a bigger hd. Can I just get a regular 7200 rpm ata 66/100 hd and plug it there with the ata33 cable and expect it to work ?!??! I know that the new cables have way more wires, will it even plug ?!?

Thanks

[piller1999]

i think it will work, but the drive will be limited to ata33 speeds.

[Kryogen]

anyone else????

[Buckus]

As long as it's IDE, it will work. Be aware that you will probably have to use a drive overlay software if the drive is >120GB due to limitations of the board.

[Kryogen]

UDMA is IDE ???

"UDMA/33 IDE"

[Kryogen]

will I need a 40 or 80 wire cable with my ata33 mobo and a ata 100 HD ????

Does the 80 and 40 wire cables have the same connectors anyway???
Will the 80 wire cable work with the old ata33 hd ???

Thanks.

[acascianelli]

check to see if there are any updated bios versions. sometimes they have fixes for large harddrives.

[O[H]-Zone]

will I need a 40 or 80 wire cable with my ata33 mobo and a ata 100 HD ????
Either...40 wire cables are cheaper.

Does the 80 and 40 wire cables have the same connectors anyway???
Yep!

Will the 80 wire cable work with the old ata33 hd ???
Yes; basically as engineers turned up the speeds on ATA drives, a problem arose. At the faster speeds, the wires in a 40-wire cable began to "crosstalk"...current was being induced in one wire by the flow of current in the next. So they came up with 80-wire cables. The same 40 wires connect the drive to the MB, but between each of those wires there's a ground. Currents induced in the ground wires are routed to the chassis, and the crosstalk is eliminated.

[Kryogen]

Thanks alot

[E4g1e]

check to see if there are any updated bios versions. sometimes they have fixes for large harddrives.
I agree with this recommendation. Unfortunately, the latest BIOS versions available for most Ultra DMA/33 motherboards still don't support anything larger than 137GB. (In fact, a few don't support anything larger than 32GB even with their latest BIOS releases!) Also, keep in mind that 48-bit LBA addressing support wasn't implemented in UDMA/33 at all - its LBA support is stuck in 28-bit mode, and 48-bit LBA support wasn't implemented until after UATA/100 had been implemented. In this case, the only solutions are: Either you use the software which came with your drive (which installs overlay software to get around your motherboard's limitations) or you purchase an Ultra ATA/133 PCI controller card (which requires the installation of their own drivers after Windows 9x or Me is up and running, or during initial installation of Windows 2000 or XP).

Also, keep in mind that the sustainable (sequential/media-to-buffer) transfer rate of the newest drives actually exceed 33 MB/s (the maximum theoretical bandwidth of UDMA/33). In that case, then you may want the PCI controller card anyway, since with such drives that will provide at least some performance gain over being bottlenecked by UDMA/33.

Once you get a large hard drive to work, then there's the issue of OS limits. Windows 95 cannot use any IDE hard drives over 32GB without risking data corruption. Windows 98 and Windows Me cannot use any IDE hard drive larger than 137GB without software workarounds which only come with the hard drive manufacturer's hard-drive partitioning/overlay software. Windows 2000 requires Service Pack 3 or later in order to use hard drives larger than 137GB; Windows XP, Service Pack 1 or later. (But if you use a PCI ATA controller card to use large hard drives, the OS limits are irrelevant since they use SCSI-based drivers anyway, and thus the supported capacity is limited only by the controller's BIOS.)

[Kryogen]

so a pci card would require me to reinstall windows xp???

[E4g1e]

so a pci card would require me to reinstall windows xp???
Oops, I did not read your quote correctly. You may reinstall Windows XP if you use a PCI card, if you want. But there is an easier way: Simply install the drivers that are specific to your PCI ATA/133 card with the card plugged into the PCI slot of the motherboard but with your IDE drive still connected to the motherboard's IDE port. Then move the IDE connector on the cable leading from your hard drive from the motherboard's IDE port to the primary port on the PCI card.

However, if your new hard drive is larger than 137GB (or 32GB, depending on your motherboard's BIOS), you must repartition and reformat that hard drive and reinstall Windows XP on it if you want the entire capacity as a single volume, unless you use third-party repartitioning software such as Partition Magic. (That's because Windows by itself cannot resize hard drive partitions without wiping out all the data on the hard disk.) If you don't want to wipe out your data or use third-party software, then you must create and format a second partition on that large hard drive.