ATA66 drives with ATA33 controler

[Carl Uman]

Will the combination of ATA66 drives with ATA33 controler? I'm guessing that they do because there are so many ATA66 drives and so few MBs with ATA66 controls built in.

Thanks,
Carl

[Vidfreek]

Yep your right, ATA66 is backwards compatible with ATA33 IDE controllers. They have to be because they need to be connected to ATA33 to set them up for ATA66.

[Yoda]

Hi,

VidFreek is wright, but beware! While most of the ata66 drives will default in ata33 mode when connected with a 40-wire IDE-cable, with some ata66 drives you have to disable the ata66 mode to be compatible with ata33.

Good luck!

[MrEd]

"When 900 years old you reach, look as good you will not. Hmm"

Sorry, I just couldn't resist. /forum/biggrin.gif
(Like I'm one to make fun of user names. Did you notice mine? lol)

-MrEd
/forum/smile.gif

[AndreBranco]

how do you disable the ata66 mode ??
i am about ot buy a maxtor 66 hd so.....

also i have a wd ac26400 66 ccapable!! so how do i disable the ata66 mdoe???

[This message has been edited by AndreBranco (edited 08-28-99).]

[Gordon]

There are ATA/66 controllers available from Promise, the Ultra66, and Abit, the Hot Rod 66, which allow the HD's to run as ATA/66's.
You will need the 80 wire cables for ATA/66, which I believe come w/the controllers.

[Glytzhkof]

To disable ATA66 check the web site of the HD manufacturer. I had to run a special program from a floppy to disable ATA66 for my IBM Deskstar 22GXP drive.

[Bayfront Benny]

I am running two WD's on IDE3 on a BE6 which comes with the ATA66 controller built into IDE3 and IDE4. The master is ATA66 and the slave ATA33. Both are idetified correcly.
Perhaps the most interesting thing is the fact that the ATA33 drive runs better, gets much better benchmarks, and 10 less use of the CPU in this mode (ATA66), than when connected to IDE1 as master or single slave. I have used both Winbench99 and to obtain the results.
What does this all mean really though to us the end users? I did a test of my own formatting drive D: (ATA33), while hooked up to IDE1 (same thing on IDE3 ATA33. After formatting in both modes I created a directory containing 1.8 Gigs of files. The time that it took to make the directory was identical (about 35 min.)
Go figure!