Harddrives ATA100 or ATA133?

E

erkan

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Aug 31, 2002
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My dad just bought a new Seagate 160 gig hard drive with 8mb cache and IDE ATA100. His motherboard is going to be using it with( new computer being built) says it supports ATA 133. Does that mean it will also work with ATA100? ALSO, is there a speed diff between 100 and 133 or is just the interface?
 
It will support it. ATA 133 supports ATA 33, 66, 100, & 133 (I think).
 
cool, but is ATA 100 and ATA 133 different in SPEED? Would he notice a difference if he had a 160gig 8mb ATA133 than his current 100?
 
as far as I know, there's not much performance difference between ATA 133 and 100. Maxtor is the only company I know of who makes ATA 133 drives.
 
ATA133 is a marketing thing, not an actual speed increase. Once people started asking why Wesyern Digital ATA100 drives were whooping their ATA133 drives, they admitted in a press conference ATA133 is nothing more than a marketing term.

For you AMD fanboys out there, we can refer to it as ATA100+ :)
 
ATA133 is marketing like djnes says, sort of like AGP 8X.

Hard drives haven't even broken ATA/66 transfer rates yet anyway.
 
Originally posted by BillLeeLee
Hard drives haven't even broken ATA/66 transfer rates yet anyway.
Click to expand...

Finally!!!! Someone else has noticed this!!!

Oh, and to be constructive.....worry about the cache on the HDD, not the speed.

8 MB good. 2 MB...not bad, but not so good either.
 
ATA-133 isn't worthless, but it's almost worthless. It just raises the ceiling for transfer rates. An ATA-133 drive connected to an ATA-133 controller can now transfer up to 132 MB/s*. Granted, this will never happen with a single drive, but a multi-drive array in RAID 0 might use it. Certainly, this is of no use to 99.999% of users, but hey, it's out there, and it's not all marketing bunk.

Let's be absolutely clear, though. ATA-133 doesn't inherently increase the performance of hard drives. Faster rotational speed, better caching, more cache, better firmware, etc.--these are what make or break a hard drive's performance.


* not a typo. The PCI interface goes up to 132 MB/s, therefore limiting the PCI based ATA-133 controller to 132 MB/s. Aw, shucks :p
 
The ATA spec is only for burst speeds...the sustained rate is the same for all the specs.
 
Originally posted by O[H]-Zone
The ATA spec is only for burst speeds...the sustained rate is the same for all the specs.
Click to expand...

and the burst (from the cache) will employ the full speed of the interface
however this doesnt translate into improved performance

Bus Trace IDE/ATAPI Bus Utilization Monitor (freeware)
run this and watch it a bit and that will become obvious

also review > As the Disk Spins @ Lost Circuits and the points xonik made will be comprehensively explained ;)
 
A lot of people spend big bucks to put stickers on their Hondas. Those Hondas certainly don't move any faster than they did before, but the people inside think they do.
 
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