ATA 66 or ATA 100 HDD?

[Jen and Chris]

Greets all. I wish to upgrade my HDD to a bigger, faster drive. I currently
have a 6.4Gb Fujitsu which came with the system I bought about 3 years ago.
It is quite full now, I have 1 Gb free which I leave in case of swap file
needing it, but as I have 448 Mb SDRAM this is often not the acse anyway. I
have seen two HDD of 30Gb size which is what Im looking for as a minimum.
The first which is slightly cheaper is ATA 66, the second is ATA 100. I am
unsure as to what my current drive is, I would have thought ATA33 due to the
age of the system. I do know that my current mainboard which I bought about
6 months back is only capable of ATA66, not 100. What I would like to know
is would I see a nice HDD access speed increase going to the ATA 66 (which I
am obviously going to be doing anyway) and would I see any significant speed
increase if I went for a ATA100 instead (I know my mainboard does not
support this, but I have seen a PCI card which will allow the connection of
an ATA 100 HDD)?

Chris

[Helix]

A few things would determine whether or not you will see a significant
increase in speed:

1) The speed of your system
2) Your frontside bus (FSB) speed
3) The speed of the drive (Higher RPM and lower average access time are
better)

My advice would be to go with the ATA/100 despite its slightly higher price.
You will find that you'll never really get 100 MB/S bandwidth, however there
will be an increase in speed. Make sure when you purchase it to buy a
UDMA/100 compliant IDE cable, otherwise you won't have any of the benefits.

"Jen and Chris" <jenan...@homeontherange99.freeserve.co.uk> wrote in
message news:9tqj8b$56f$1...@newsg1.svr.pol.co.uk...

[John]

Your old motherboard probably does not support ATA100. On other hand all or
most HD sold today are ATA100 so I do not see a point looking for older
ATA66.

The seek, access time for ATA66 or ATA100 is the same. It means the time
data gets to buffer assuming that both disk rated with the same speed (etc
7200 rpm) is about the same. The only difference is that the buffer which
communicates with the rest of the board runs at 100 MHz for ATA100 and 66
MHz for ATA66.

So you will have some speed increase if you transfer all the time big chunks
of data to your system for HD when you use ATA100 on motherboard which
supports it.

I have one PC running ATA66 (7200 rpm) and other running ATA100 (7200rpm)
the average increase is only 13% (not 50%)

[Lane Lewis]

Regardless of the ATA 100 or 66 spec, a 7200 rpm drive should give you
faster access. If the price difference is small get the ATA 100 and do not
worry about an add in card.

Lane

"Jen and Chris" <jenan...@homeontherange99.freeserve.co.uk> wrote in
message news:9tqj8b$56f$1...@newsg1.svr.pol.co.uk...

[Jen and Chris]

Cheers all. I have seen the access time due to rpm speeds and botht he
drives Im looking at are 7200 rpm. The drives are about £75 ($110) and if I
wanted to access the drive at ATA 100 with the add-in PCI card, that costs
£35 ($50).

Chris

[kony]

Sun, 25 Nov 2001 11:04:02 -0000, "Jen and Chris"
<jenan...@homeontherange99.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:

Hi Chris.

The ATA66 your motherboard supports should be enought to satisfy, only
benchmarks will notice the slight difference in moving up to ATA100
interface. If your motherboard supported only ATA33 I'd recommend
adding an IDE controller card, but not just to jump from ATA66 to
ATA100 for a single drive.

However, i would go with the ATA100 drive, as it's likely a newer
generation, which can mean greater data density (which increases
sustained throughput) and often cooler and quieter drives.

Dave

[c t]

Great, cheers fior the advice there.

Chris

kony wrote in message <3c01cf9b...@news.earthlink.net>...