WD205BA on ATA100 ?

[booth]

I have a Western Digital WD205BA (20G, ATA66). If it is connected to my new ASUS A7V133 ATA100 controller with the proper ATA100 cable, will it be supported at 100MHz? Or will the system throttle it down to 66?

[Harold7]

You can d/l the Western Digital DLGUDMA utility which will tell you whether this HD will work at ATA100 and allow you to enable it if the HD will support it.
As I recall, I had the WD20.5 BA version and it would only work at ATA66... the HD specs from the WD site should give you all the info you need. http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif

[Fingers]

The WD205BA is an ATA-66 drive; the WD205BB is ATA-100.
http://www.westerndigital.com/products/non-current/drives/wd205ba-e.html

Don't be concerned about the difference between ATA-66 and ATA-100. Tests have proven that ATA-66 doesn't provide any real world gain over ATA-33, ATA-66 to ATA-100 is even less. If you do the math, you'll find that most current hard drives barely take advantage of even the 33MB/s that ATA-33 provides.

ATA-66 vs ATA-33 (http://www.hwupgrade.com/hd/ata66_vs_ata33/)

[booth]

Thanks. I knew it was ATA-66, just didn't know if the real limitation was the cable or not. I am considering getting a second drive to set them up as RAID-0 on my ASUS A7V133. That should speed things up much better than ATA speed, right? I could migrate this drive to my daughter and pop for two ATA-100's but it the pair at ATA-66 is about the same, I won't bother buying two new.

[daverme]

As far as I know, there is no "ATA-100 cable". There are 40 conductor cables (the "old" IDE cables) and the newer 80 conductor cables that were introduced when ATA-66 drives first appeared on the scene. The 80 conductor cables still have 40 pins, just like the older ones; the extra 40 conductors are grounds that stabilize the signal and are necessary to allow the higher data transfer rates. To my knowledge, the same 80 conductor cables are used for both ATA-66 and ATA-100 drives.

The primary advantage of a RAID-0 array is to provide SUSTAINED data transfer rates, like for video capture, that are not obtainable with a single drive. Unless you really NEED sustained high transfer rates, I doubt you will benefit from using a RAID array.