I'm building a computer for a friend, and they want to use their old hard drive. I'm not sure if its ATA66, 100, or 133, and was wondering if motherboards with ATA133 are backwards compatible, or if they only support certain ones (ie. ATA66/100 ONLY or ATA100/133 ONLY) Thanks a lot!
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Mobo ATA133 backwards compatible with 100/66?
- Thread starter chzxmnky
- Start date
RavenD said:Backwards compatible, however if you use another device on the same IDE channel, it'll be limited to the speed of the slowest device. So ATA66 and ATA133 drives on same channel would run at ATA66.
Also recognize that if you don't use an 80 pin cable, you will get ata33/66 speeds. 80 pin cables have many small wires or say ATA100/133 cable
RavenD said:Backwards compatible, however if you use another device on the same IDE channel, it'll be limited to the speed of the slowest device. So ATA66 and ATA133 drives on same channel would run at ATA66.
That's not quite correct. Ever since ATA33, ATA devices support independent device timing - which means that each ATA device will run at its own interface speed. The only time that an entire ATA channel will slow down is if you run a PIO-only IDE device on the same channel as an Ultra ATA device (or any other DMA-supporting IDE device), in which case the entire IDE channel will run in PIO-only mode.
Of course, the ATA controller's interface speed will also limit the burst performance of an ATA device: You can run ATA100 devices on an ATA66 controller, but that ATA100 device will run at only ATA66.