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To: Kenith Lee who wrote (22080)	12/9/2000 8:02:22 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Re: ATA100 controller... it is a waste? Bottom line is, ATA-66 is overkill for a non-raid system. ATA-100 doesn't hurt anything, but is unlikely to provide any benefit during the life of the board. Here is some info from Tom's: Motherboards with Intel's BX-chipset don't support ATA66 and so Promise could sell their 'Ultra66'-controller to owners of systems with those motherboards. Now there's one important thing to remember though. Even the fastest IDE drives today can only supply data rates of 30 MB/s when reading the data directly from the disk. Only data that happens to reside in the dedicated read/write cache on the hard drive can be transferred at a higher speed. The same is valid for writes. Data can be transferred to the drive pretty fast, until the cache is full. Then the write speed rate is again limited by the physical abilities of the hard drive, which today is in the range of 20-30 MB/s. Thus you can hardly ever see any improvement when you switch from ATA33 to ATA66. Especially hard drives with small caches can take only little advantage of ATA66. This does of course not mean that the physical read/write rates of IDE hard drives won't skip the 33 MB/s limitation of ATA33 very soon, so ATA66 does make perfect sense as long as it doesn't come at a too high premium. www6.tomshardware.com Dan