ATA 133 PCI Card

[mcs328]

I have a motherboard thats limited to ATA 66. If I buy an ATA 133 PCI controller card, do you think I'll see a noticeable difference or is that just a waste of money? Any problems booting off the card versus the mobo or is it pretty much transparent?

I don't do much...download music, play Warcraft III and burn some CDs. Typical stuff.

[jase71]

More than likely, not worth the money.

Even very good hard drives seldom sustain more than 40MB/sec... so they're not seriously threatening the 66MB/sec ATA66 spec.

An ATA-133 card will give you slightly better burst reads as the hard drive unloads it's cache... but that's such a small percentage of the overall performance picture that I wouldn't bother.

Buy more memory, or a better video card, or even a better hard drive. Any of them will have a greater effect on system performance than bumping from an ATA66 to ATA133 card...

[PoloM1]

I agree with jase71. Even though ATA133 sounds like it could be twice as fast as ATA66, I hear that the actual performance difference between the 2 aren't that great. If you need the extra throughput now, you might want to consider getting a RAID card and another HD, otherwise I would just wait for serial ATA, hopefully we see some decent performance gains there.

[ribitch]

if your motherboard has a promise ata 66 controller, it may have an available raid hack. check into seeing if there is one. Buying a second HD an setting up a stripe array will then improve performance

[Hoser]

The main reason that I use an ATA-133 (or ATA-100) card is for each drive to be on it's own channel. I usually have two hard drives, a CDRW and DVD drive in my computers. When ripping CDs it's quite a bit faster since there's none of the drives have to wait for each other.

[ribitch]

Originally posted by Hoser
The main reason that I use an ATA-133 (or ATA-100) card is for each drive to be on it's own channel. I usually have two hard drives, a CDRW and DVD drive in my computers. When ripping CDs it's quite a bit faster since there's none of the drives have to wait for each other.

great reasoning. I was the same way until i found my card was hackable

[cross56]

I usually use my ata 133 for the same reason. Extra ide channels. But I found that my seek times seemed to be a slight faster with my ata 133 over my ata 100. But it could just be my imagination. I would recommend useing an ata 133 controler over the mobo ata 66 if your hard drive supports it. For small file transfers you might not see a noticable differenc but with burning to a faster burner or transfering large files I think you might see a difference. But thats just me. You can get an oem Promise ata 133 off the internet for probley $30 or $40. Any way thats my 2Cents worth.

[gwilks98]

Originally posted by ribitch


great reasoning. I was the same way until i found my card was hackable

What do you mean "hackable?"

[DoPeY5007]

Originally posted by gwilks98


What do you mean "hackable?" some ATA-66/100 cards were hackable into RAID cards

[Diablo]

Just out of curiosity, I'm getting a new HD for my main comp & i'll be transfering the drives that were in it to my backup/testing comp which is ATA 33. Am I going to notice a significant slow-down & is it worth investing in an ATA 100 or 133 card?