newer HD's .vs older

[habba]

I use an older 6.4 gig HD right now. If my board supports ata66, can I still use a newer ata100 HD like a caviar HD.


thanks

[Richard_Cranium72]

I think for sure you can.

The mobo supports the ATA/66 then surely it won't balk at the 8gb limit of older motherboards.

The one I posted in Steals & Deals is a rather good buy.

DrVette

[Psycho Logical]

You can use the ATA-100 drive, but of course it will only perform at an ATA-66 level.

You will have to use an 80-wire ribbon cable to achieve the higher transfer rate.

[otheos]

Go ahead and buy an ATA100 drive and hook it on your ATA66 controller. NO PROBLEM!
You will need an 80 wire 40pin cable (required for ATA66 and ATA100).

ATA100 is backwards compatible with ATA66. Obviously the drive will be restricted to bursts of 66MB/s rather than 100MB/s but this has NO performance impact at all as no drive's performance reach nowhere near 66MB/s, let alone 100MB/s and bursts do not affect performance.

EDIT: don't let anyone convince you otherwise, ATA100 is hardly of any real improvement, but rather a marketing hype. Combined bandwidth in ATA is not applicable as in SCSI:

SCSI needs as much bandwidth as possible. The fact that it has now reached 160MB/s (and soon 320MB/s) does not mean that a single drive will burst at 160MB/s and hence be fast! No! It means that when you hook up 5 hard drives that have sustained transfer rates of 30-40MB/s, they will have enough bandwith for ALL of them to send data simultaneously (ok, 5x30=150MB/s so you're within limit or there about). When you hook up a RAID array (external) with sustained rates of 100MB/s most of the bandwidth is used up. Add one more RAID array and you immediately need higher than 200MB/s bandwidth.

This is NOT the case in IDE as NO TWO devices can use the controller at the same time. So the addition of STR (sustained Transfer Rates) is not valid on IDE. When the one hard drive transfers data across, the other is (slave) cannot! The max drives you may have at the same time is 2 (one per channel) accessing the same time. So with today's IDE drives maxing STR's in the 20-40MB/s, 66MB/s is still plenty. But I hear you asking: 40+40=80MB/s so there! 66MB/s is not enough! Right? well considering that this is a home system and not a server, the times that both drives are actually peaking in STR simultaneously for a home system are like..... few! extremely few!

Just my 2c.

[This message has been edited by otheos (edited 07-24-2001).]

[habba]

thanks jonty and psycho

[habba]

thank you otheos,
I was asking because I want to buy something bigger for a better system that I haven't built yet. I wanted to make sure it would work on the AT board in the meantime.

[Jonty]

Hold on! Surely if the board only supports ATA66 then you will not get it to run at ATA100 just because you use an 80 wire cable! It will still run at ATA66.

If you hook it up to a controller card that's a different story.