worth buying ATA133?

[Whitedot]

i have just seen a good deal on a ata133 hdd, my new motherboard only runs ata100. will it work, and is it worth buying for the future when i buy a new motherboard?

your thoughts please.

[Toejam31]

The ATA standard is backwards-compatible. So, yes ... the hard drive will work, but it will run at ATA/100 unless you install an ATA/133 PCI IDE controller card.

There's not a great deal of difference between ATA/100 and ATA/133 ... primarily the burst rate of the drive, which is not really such a big deal.

Many new mainboards coming out this year will inherently support ATA/133, but it's not a valid reason for upgrading your mainboard, especially when you can purchase the controller card, IMHO. However, if you do intend to upgrade the mainboard fairly soon, you might as well have a hard drive that can take advantage of ATA/133. You can easily run the drive at ATA/100 with your older board until you upgrade.

I'd be paying more attention to the other specifications of a drive, such as the seek rate and average read/write speed, not to mention any user comments about failure rates with a specific brand name.

Note: If the drive is large, say 127GB or more (and many ATA/133 drives have quite a bit of storage space) you might need a BIOS update for the mainboard to identify the drive. Hopefully ... not. But I'd keep it in mind.

Toejam31

My Rig: Toejam31's Tantalizing Tantric Toy (http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=6847)

[Whitedot]

thanks for that. the drive is a 20gb maxtor 740dx, are they any good? the spindle speed is 7200rpm, which is the main thing i want.

[Toejam31]

They are excellent drives. I installed 6 over the weekend, and have two more on order! Very popular drives ... fast and quiet.

Toejam31

My Rig: Toejam31's Tantalizing Tantric Toy (http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=6847)