Hard drives

[jl123]

I have a question. If a motherboard doesn't support Ultra DMA will the hard drive run? Or will it just run at the speed that the interface can handle? I believe the mobo has to support ultra dma because if not then it couldn't handle the transfer speeds. Am i right?

~Joel(jl123)

[ghostface]

i believe running a ata/66 drive on a normal ata/33 mobo will just run it at 33. i got a new maxtor 7200rpm 30gig udma66 hd for my new system. it came before my cpu did so i slapped it into my sister's old p200mmx from like 3 years ago to format it and put some software on it. ran fine but i'm sure it wasn't running at full capacity. then again, sandra says my drive isn't running at udma66 now either. go figure.

[tonym]

The motherboard controls the speed of the data handshake to/from the HDD. If you have an ATA/66 HDD, but a ATA/33 mobo, then the transfer speed will be ATA/33. It's not like the drive will spray gibberish data at some incredible data rate at the mobo if it's too slow. The mobo is the controller and the HDD is the slave. The same situation exists for a n ATA/33 HDD with an ATA/66 mobo. The mobo controls the data exchange and synchronizes to the data transfer rate limitation of the HDD. The exact scenario exists for UDMA HDDs and mobos. All this data transfer and negotiating functionality is normally contained in the so-called "Southbridge" controller on the mobo.

Hope this helps...

Tony

[jl123]

Yep! It does. You don't know how confused i was. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif Thanks alot!

~Joel(jl123)

[shadow]

It may depend on the drive. My WD HDD did not work proper on UDMA33 because it is factory set at 66. I had to turn off the 66 with their software before it would work right on my UDMA33 mobo.