ATA/66 any good?

[BadBen]

My WD Expert (ATA/66, 7200rpm)is currently on a ATA/33 connection. If I put my drive on a ad-in ATA/66 card will my performance increase? If so any advice on any card would be helpfull.

Thank You

[seti]

Arrrrrg.

If you did a search I bet you could find me awnser this question atleast 4 times. http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif

Your drive (and all current ide drives), can't read off the platers faster than 33mb/s. So the only performance benifit is found when the requested data is already in the buffer. This is 2mb out of however big your drive is.

The next generation drives are the first that will start to make any significant performance gain by useing ata66...and they're already on to ata100. http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif

[Kookstick]

Badben- I asked the same question a few days ago and seti already answered me also but one thing that was a benefit for me was that I bought a new IBM ata/66 to be used with a ata/33 board and I got the promise ultra 66 for 30 bucks and how it helped me was it allowed me to run the IBM drive on it's own chanell instead of sharing it with my zip drive cause I also have a cdrom and a cdr. So it may be helpful in that way but what seti said is exactly what others have said also. hope this helps a little

[Dave2]

If you have at least 128MB RAM then you won't notice any difference. I have 256MB RAM and a while back I bought a Promise Ultra 66 card to use with my Maxtor 27.2GB UDMA 66 7200 rpm hard drive. Nothing seemed faster. I you have only 32MB RAM then you might see a big difference. Since you're already using ATA 33 install more RAM instead of buying an ATA 66 card.

[Phantom]

I will second what Dave2 said above, upgrade your Memory first! I have 192MB Ram and got a Maxtor 7200rpm UDMA 66 HD. Did NOT see ANY speed increase when I put in an Ultra 66 controller card http://www.sysopt.com/forum/frown.gif

Phantom

[Tom Pico]

I see a big speed difference but only while loading a large file from the hard drive into ram.
I'm running 256megs of PC133 ram and 550MHz P3 coppermine o/c'd to 733MHz on an Abit BE6-II. I had problems setting up the UDMA 66 for my IBM 20 GB deskstar (7200 rpm) so I ran it at UDMA33 for the last month. I recently figured out how to activate the UDMA66 and see a big difference in loading large files into ram. For example a MechWarrior 3 scenario file that used to load in 5-8 seconds (seemed like forever) now loads almost instantaneously - 2-3 seconds at most. Same thing for large image files. I have some 2+MB astro photo's in BMP format that I use for wallpaper. Not only does my imaging program load in a snap, these photo's pop right up now. For things like word processors you'll only notice the speed difference while loading the program, individual documents are too small to show any benefit from a faster throughput on your harddrive.
The above subjective observations were somewhat verified by using my bench marking program to check the drive throughput change. SiSoft Sandra 2000 showed an increase from 7800 to 10500. This increase (about 25%) seems less than what I am seeing/feeling subjectively.
Anyway, obviously my feeling is that UDMA66 is worth using.