ATA 66 vs ATA 100

QuackingPenguin

QuackingPenguin

Banned
Ok can someone tell me if it's worth putting a PCI ATA 100 controller in my G4 400. i currently have the factory 20gb and im getting X soon. Will an ata-66 drive with higher speed (7200 rather than 5400) give a significant speed jump? i notice a sizeable wait when copying a 400 mb file, to the same partition.


thanks

QP
 
the higher speed (7200) will certainly be an improvement over the 5400. i would never buy a 5400 rpm drive these days. just not worth the headache... especially when it would only sae you a small amount of $.
 
if you can buy scsi only. lol, rip off, but is much better then ata. i have a pc, Athlon XP 1700+ 1.47ghz. 512mb ddr ram. ata/100 controller on mobo and 7200rpm drives. 80gb and 40gb. on different channels too. when copying a large folder from one drove to the other it slows down my pc to a crawl at times. wish SCSI this would be noticably faster so then my pc wouldn't slow down as much. but then scsi is 3-5 times the cost. or more.
Like for a U160 scsi card $300 or little less. $200-$275 for 18-24gb scsi drive. U160 one.

Anyhow if you have ata/66 and go to ata/100 you won't notice much difference at all. I went from ata/33 to ata/100 controller on a hard drive a while ago and noticed roughly 40% increase in speed. like 40% faster to copy same folder. this on older computer, not my current one. so with you it be a lot less increase in speed. going from 5400 to 7200 will help a bit, but not huge. you'll see it i think.

if you can go scsi, if not then get 7200 rpm and no need for ata/100 pci card, but as they are only $40-$50 then I'd get one. well promise tech ata/100 for pc's cost $40-$50.
 
We have several G-4s on our campus and I have noted a definite difference in start-up time and when working with disk intensive apps. While SCSI drives are faster, their expense and size can often be limiting factor. The difference between 5400 and 7200 rpm has been significant enough to make 7200 rpm the standard. We haven't tried the new ATA-100 yet, and I keep hearing that until Apple gives up 66mhz PCI slots, we wouldn't benifit. That I am not sure of and if anyone could clarify, I would appreciate it.
 
A 7200 RPM HD is worth getting, IMO, over a 5400 RPM drive. You'll see a noticable difference in performance.

As far as an ATA-100 interface vs. an ATA-66 interface, It's not worth it to buy an ATA-100 PCI card, you simply won't get much of a performance increase. On an ATA-66 bus, a 7200 RPM drive cannot saturate the bus, in fact check out the sustained transfer rates on a 7200 RPM drive: they are far below 66 mb! But for short durations of time, the 7200 RPM drives can exceed the ATA-66 bus's limit with burst transfer speeds. This has to do with the HD data cache and some other technical things I don't understand very well, but what it comes down to in real world experience is that while there is a significant difference between an ATA33 and an ATA66 bus (because ATA33 is slower than the sustained data rate), the difference between an ATA66 and ATA100 bus is negligible.

For some more info, check out this thread:

http://forums.appleinsider.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=1&t=001191

;)
 
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