NEW IDE CONTROLLER

[kazuza]

I was thinking in upgrading my system with a PCI IDE controller, mostly for work (assembling duzens of pc's a day and installing the same software in the same hardware, duhhh!)... so, I was thinking in seting up such a controller and a hard drive bay to fit CD-ROM slot space for cloning those machine's drives.
Question: Will it be worth to install a ATA 133 PCI, since drives are ATA 100?
Does it consumes much resources for the host machine? (Specs=PIII 1GHz, 512MB 133MHz, Win ME no porbs yet ~1 year install )?

[Midknyte]

It shouldn't make any difference. Only maxtors support ata133 anyway. It won't take any more resources than an ata100 card. If the drive only supports ata100, then the controller card will automatically sync to ata100 also.

[kazuza]

Midknyte, thanks for your reply and it cleared my mind in some points, but what I was asking, was if such a PCI card takes very demand from the CPU, FSB or RAM...

[Midknyte]

Oh. Since it's on PCI bus, it shouldn't affect the FSB.

The card should act pretty much like the onboard IDE controller, so I don't think it will take the same CPU power. I don't think it can help manage drives like a scsi card would.

I don't think you'll see as good performance with the PCI card versus the onboard IDE, since it is limited to 33mhz PCI bus. PCI bus has a max bandwidth of 133MB/s. At the theoretical max, ATA133 would take the whole PCI bus!! The PCI bus is shared by all your PCI devices, so the controller would put a strain on the PCI.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't get a PCI IDE card, but it's just not as good as the onboard IDE. This is just one man's opinion.

[Psycho Logical]

Originally posted by Midknyte
I don't think you'll see as good performance with the PCI card versus the onboard IDE, since it is limited to 33mhz PCI bus. PCI bus has a max bandwidth of 133MB/s. At the theoretical max, ATA133 would take the whole PCI bus!! The PCI bus is shared by all your PCI devices, so the controller would put a strain on the PCI.

What does the PCI bandwidth have to do with anything in this case? All data transfer to or from the hard drive will go through the data (ribbon) cable, and certainly does not occur over the PCI bus. The only time the bus would be involved is when controller card needs to communicate directly with the CPU or vice versa. The PCI bandwidth limitation would not come into play at all, unless you had so many expansion cards that they all bogged down while multi-tasking many simultaneous operations that each required different PCI cards like NIC's, sound cards, etc.

PCI controller cards have their own onboard BIOS, optimized and dedicated strictly to the data transfer operations. In many cases they can do the job better and faster than the onboard channels.

[otheos]

What on earth are you talking about. The IDE controller is a PCI device. Of course it is. The fact that it's not physically on a PCI card doesn't make any difference. Same for the onboard sound and USB controllers. They all come through the PCI bus and they are subject to PCI bandwidth limitations.

Off board PCI2IDE bridges as they arre named, are identical to the onboard or even built in chipset ones, do not consume OS resources (like softmodems) unless used as "RAID" controllers.

The BIOS is there for them to be able to boot and they offer absolutely no performance advantage to the built in controller.

ATA100/133 are identical in performance, however only ATA133 will support dives larger than 132GB for the time being as motherboard manufacturers are not willing to add such support to current ATA100 based boards so that people see ATA133 as a new feature and buy new boards.

[Psycho Logical]

Re-read what Midknyte wrote.

I fully realize that they are PCI devices. Whether using the onboard controller or an expansion card, the data itself transfers via the ribbon cable, NOT THE BUS.

The whole idea behind bus mastering is to reduce bus traffic and the workload on the CPU, and permit data to move directly between the hard drive and memory. The PCI bus bandwidth should not be a factor, except as I noted before.

[otheos]

So the data from the HD goes to the RAM through the cable???? What are you talking about??

The data from the disk goes to the IDE2PCI bus and from the PCI bus to the RAM.

DMA has absolutely nothing to do with it. It only means that CPU does not have to referee such transactions.

EDIT: all he's saying is that potentially the ATA133 PCI card could use the full PCI bandwidth (not that it can happen as you can have a max of 100MB/s by two drives maxing at once on the controller, but this was still a problem with ATA100.

Then he confuses it and thinks that the onboard IDE controller is not a PCI device too and that the same bottleneck stands. But comparing that to your "the data goes down the cable not the BUS" is nowhere near as wrong.

[Midknyte]

Oops. I just reread what I wrote. Yeah, they are all PCI devices. I think I confused that with being connected to the south bridge, also a PCI device. Sorry for the mixup there.

As far as the ata133 thing, i don't see drives maxing that out since PCI is limited to 133MB/s for the entire bus. performance difference between ata100 and ata133 isn't that much.

[Midknyte]

Ack! I meant the hdd is directly managed by the south bridge. Geez. I think I need a V8.

[kazuza]

OK! So, I made up my mind. I'm ready to order my new ATA 100 IDE controller, but...
Can't make up my mind! The brand choice is obviously Promise, and dispite I've been on their site just a fiew minutes ago, I can't find any info about my two possible choices:

Promise Ultra 100
Promise Fast Track 100

What's the difference between these two cards?
Cos I don't wanna pay for a RAID system. That's not my intention.I want to connect hard drives but CD-RW's also.
RAID, by as powerfull as it may be, is out of the question.
Please advise as I wanted to make the order yet today...

Many thanx...

[Midknyte]

The Ultra 100TX2 is just a regular controller.
The Fast Track 100 is a RAID controller.

Here's the link to promise's website:
http://www.promise.com/

Otheos and Psycho, sorry for the confusion before!

[kazuza]

I can only find information in that site for TX2 versions.
What's the difference between then and the original series?

[Midknyte]

I think this is the main difference:
Ultra 100 - supports only 33mhz pci bus
Ultra 100 TX2 - supports 66 and 33mhz pci bus

Ultra 100TX2 supports drives larger than 137GB with bios update. I'm not sure if the regular Ultra 100 does or not.

I think you should just get the TX2. Newer is usually better.

[BipolarBill]

Originally posted by Midknyte
Ultra 100 - supports only 33mhz pci bus
Ultra 100 TX2 - supports 66 and 33mhz pci bus

Ultra 100TX2 supports drives larger than 137GB with bios update.

I think you should just get the TX2. Newer is usually better.

All true.

Get the Ultra100 TX2, Kaz. Your next IDE purchase will most likely be Serial ATA anyway.

I'm glad you came on board, Midknyte...thanks for sharing the load.