Is (PATA) ATA 100 slower than (IDE) ATA 133

[dtp4]

OK this might sound like a dumb question, but here it goes any hoo. Im thinking of building a new system and have been checking motherboards out on Newegg and run across a Biostar board (TForce4SLI) that Im thinking of getting but in the storage device description on it has (PATA 2 x ATA100 up to 4 Devices ) Im not new to computers (I built 1 a couple years ago) but I will admit I have not kept up on the technoligy like I should have.....but when I did keep up, the ATA 133 was the way to go for a harddrive.Why would a new board only have a rating of ATA 100 for the harddrives? I have been thinking about going with the SATA set up any way but this ATA 100 thing has been bugging me, Ive looked around on the net and in these post to find the answer but couldnt locate it. Is there anyone out there that will take the time to tell me is PATA ATA 100 better than IDE ATA 133 and why. Thanks In Advance.



Also if I do go with the ATA 100 drive will I still be able to use my ATA 133 drives as xtra storage.

 

[dtp4]

Ya but I guess where Im confused is why would a board that is 2-3 years newer than what Im running now only be rated at PATA 100 and the old one ATA 133 from what Ive been reading they just changed the term from ATA to PATA, when I first started researching the change in tecnology over the past couple years PCI express for video cards and SLI ect ect ect..... I thought that PATA was a new tech , but if im understanding right its not.....only a change of term.

 

[sturm]

Maxtor started (i believe) the whole ata 133 speed.
There is no speed difference between an ata 100 drive and an ata 133 drive. Neither drive can use the whole bandwidth.
Western Digital never made an ata 133 drive, no need to.
Maxtor was trying to use the same "higher speed is better" idea that Intel did.

 

[dtp4]

So when I get ready to put this new system together I can use the maxtor drives that I already have , and not loose any performance?There all 7200 RPM with 8mb cache....or should I spring for a new drive?

 

[danizaken]

I believe the P of ATA, which stands for parallel, was especially used since the entrance of SATA, in order to differ between the two.

 

[dtp4]

Yes I beleive that is the reason for the PATA from what Ive been reading up on at different sites......still puzzles me that a new board has only PATA 100 max read rather than PATA 133 interface maybe I should just forget about it and look for a different board with PATA 133 if there is such a board or just use a SATA drive for the operating system and use my ATA or (PATA) drives for xtra storage so they dont go to waste.........


but this brings up another ? for me if I put the operating system on a SATA drive and use the PATA for storage will this slow down the performance of the SATA drive when I go to read from the ATA or (PATA) drive?.....I'm gonna use this system for windows media center operating system and will be reading alot of video and music from the xtra storage drives.

 

[cheetsy]

agreed!

 

[keen5336]

yeah I'm repeating everyone here, but as a conformation. The P in PATA stands for Parallel, and its now used because of SATA (Serial) to tell them apart.

IDE ATA 100 is the same as PATA 100, and the companies that use the PATA term I don't think use ATA 133 anyway. So just like everyone else said as well, you won't loose any performance, don't worry, they are totaly interchangable.

 

[pip_seeker]

but this brings up another ? for me if I put the operating system on a SATA drive and use the PATA for storage will this slow down the performance of the SATA drive when I go to read from the ATA or (PATA) drive?.....I'm gonna use this system for windows media center operating system and will be reading alot of video and music from the xtra storage drives.

Well first you have to understand what the 100 and 133 represent.

They represent the Burst speed. There are many things with HDD's that determine how fast they go. Burst speed really doesn't add much to the speed of a drive.

It's like going from a 100mhz proc to 133mhz. You're not going to notice the difference.

The biggest things that helps or hurts speed are a several factors...

Sustained Data Transfer
RPM of the Drive
How full of data the drive is
How many partitions the drive has.

With that being said pretty much any modern 7500 RPM drive 100/133 whatever is easily capable of sustained through put of 30MB/sec or more to about 80% -90% of capacity of the drive.

Being that video is probably the most demanding on any PC drive system we can use that as an example.

Capturing Native DV video comes in at around 3.5MB/sec. So as you can see compared to the above there is plenty of head room even for this demanding task.

While SATA is getting faster all the time it's really over kill for most average everyday type tasks. As few as about 7 yrs ago it was more of a challenge... but not today.

 

[Crashman]

ATA133 was developed by VIA and Maxtor, it's their standard. SiS and nVidia adopted it, but Intel didn't, nor did Western Digital or Seagate.

 

[dtp4]

Well I would like to thank all who posted the answers here for me,I have a better understanding of this PATA thing than I did 24 hours ago.......my conclusion is that for know until I get this new system up ond running and make sure there are no bugs in it Im gonna go with a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 160GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA133 Hard Drive then I figure that after awhile when I need something to keep me busy I will get a SATA drive and get some experence with that.


Thanks Again to everyone

 

[enewmen]

Hi
I remember reading ( a few times) that the ATA 100 can only read up to 127 Gigs. If a drive is larger than that, you will need to partition the drive to 127 gig parts.
Is this still the case? Or nothing will stop me from getting a 500 Gig drive on a ATA 100 interface and format one huge partition ??

thanks. I really want to know.

 

[Pain]

As far as I know that is not the case, you will be able to read larger disks, but you'll need XP sp2 if I recall correctly.

IRT the original question, the other thing I'm not sure was mentioned [if it was, forgive me] is that the disk will only sustain less than 80Mb/s transfer rate. Even the fastest IDE disks can't do any more, so as someone above said, the 133 rating is moot.

 

[MarkG]

I remember reading ( a few times) that the ATA 100 can only read up to 127 Gigs. If a drive is larger than that, you will need to partition the drive to 127 gig parts.

Not unless you have a crappy old BIOS. I have a 200GB drive sitting on the ATA100 bus of my 845 chipset with no problems: both BIOS and XP see it as a 200GB drive.

 

[sojrner]

that was an os thing not a hardware thing... winxp pre-sp1 could not recognize a drive bigger than that. Anything post sp1 is fine... all Linux/unix had no prbs w/ the bigger drives for many moons.

 

[darkstar782]

OK, PATA = UDMA = EIDE for your purposes.

100 or 133 is the theoretical max throughput. In practice the PCI bus itself only has 133 mb/s max throughput so this would only be achieveable if no other PCI cards were doing anything anyway.

In practice, no single IDE drive (be it UDMA100 or UDMA133) is ever likely to output more than about 50mb/s.

As such, it doesnt really matter if the interface is capeable of 100 or 1,000,000 mb/s, the drive cant read that fast.

All 133 drives will work on 100 interfaces, and vice versa. There are some old systems with UDMA100 that wont support larger than 128gb, but ALL MODERN MOTHERBOARDS WILL. Even the old ones can often be fixed with a BIOS update, if not there are little programs to work around it anyway.

The difference between 133 and 100 is so pointless that alot of sites mislable drives and boards as 100 when they are 133 anyway.... in short, dont worry about it!

Then there is Seriel ATA, or SATA. SATA1 is capeable of 150mb/s, and SATA2 300mb/s. they also support new features such as NCQ.

To be honest, even Western Digitals 10,000 RPM raptors are not limited by SATA1, and the main advantages of SATA over PATA are:

#1 longer max cable length and the possibility of external SATA drives

#2 smaller cables that dont obstruct airflow

#3 no fussing about with Master/Slave

#4 no possibility of damaging pins on the HDD

The only real disadvangages of SATA are:

#1 Very few optical drives availible for it, but most mobos have PATA anyway.

#2 not backwards compatible with PATA (the cables wont fit ) without an annoying little adapter.

#3 SATA1 cables can be a little insecure and are easy to dislodge

 

[FITCamaro]

Theoretically yes, reality no.

 

[pip_seeker]

Hi
I remember reading ( a few times) that the ATA 100 can only read up to 127 Gigs. If a drive is larger than that, you will need to partition the drive to 127 gig parts.
Is this still the case? Or nothing will stop me from getting a 500 Gig drive on a ATA 100 interface and format one huge partition ??

thanks. I really want to know.

It's not ATA100 that has the problem it's the OS.. WinXp and Windows2000 with SP2 rectify this problem.

And it's 137GB not 127GB

 

[FITCamaro]

#4 no possibility of damaging pins on the HDD

Instead you have to worry about breaking the actual cable.

Don't hate SATA but it happens quite easily if you're not careful.

 

[pip_seeker]

IRT the original question, the other thing I'm not sure was mentioned [if it was, forgive me] is that the disk will only sustain less than 80Mb/s transfer rate. Even the fastest IDE disks can't do any more, so as someone above said, the 133 rating is moot.

first of all I question what you mean by 80Mb/s do you mean Mega Byte or Mega bit... the difference is major as there are 8bits to a byte so your pronunciation refers to 10MB/s or MegaByte.

With Ide it is very unlikely you will sustain much more than about the high 30's MB/sec unless you are running a Raid 0 and even then as you fill the drives the sustained rate will fall over time. Most drives [7500RPM] pretty much hit the 30MB/s mark and can sustain that pretty close to around 80% capacity of the drive and it slowly falls from there.

You won't get no where near 80MB/s sustained on a single IDE drive.

All the 100/ 133 refer to is the Burst Data rate... the only real use for this number is HYPE.

 

[Pain]

30 I think is low, and considering that we're talking about ATA 100 or ATA 133, then I'm talking about 80 of them. 50-70 is pretty much the max you'll see, I said less than 80 which is generous.

When I was in school back in the dark ages, M = meg, m = milli, B = byte and b = bit. MB/s would be megabytes per second. Obviously, Mb is a typo, but today I see people writing it all kinds of different way, but when we're talking about a disk controller, I assume we all are speaking about the same thing. Looking through this thread I see a lot of megabytes per second and a log of millibits per second, so do you want to question them too?

 

[pip_seeker]

30 I think is low, and considering that we're talking about ATA 100 or ATA 133, then I'm talking about 80 of them. 50-70 is pretty much the max you'll see, I said less than 80 which is generous.

uh no you won't...

45GB IBM 75GXP
http://radified.com/Benches/hdtach_75gxp_w2ksp2.htm

Maxtor [2] 40GB Diamond Max60 Raid-0
http://radified.com/Benches/hdtach_ideraid_whit.htm

I thought I'd make an example of you first... you're the lucky one!

 

[darkstar782]

I think he means that overheads and PCI saturation mean the interface cant even 'burst' at 133mb/s, let alone is the hdd capeable of it

 

[Pain]

Exactly. The answer to the original question is that 133 is faster on paper, but you will never see it. The rest of the argument is purely academic. I've seen tests of drives above 30 [like the raptors, but granted they are SATA and 10k rpm], but it really doesn't matter one way or the other. You're not going to hit a 100, let alone 133.

ADDED: This is one review that shows transfers faster than 30, up to 60 in some cases, which is what I was referencing. But, again, still nothing close to 100.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/09/27/round/

 

[pip_seeker]

I think he means that overheads and PCI saturation mean the interface cant even 'burst' at 133mb/s, let alone is the hdd capeable of it

no... can you read?

IRT the original question, the other thing I'm not sure was mentioned [if it was, forgive me] is that the disk will only sustain less than 80Mb/s transfer rate. Even the fastest IDE disks can't do any more, so as someone above said, the 133 rating is moot.

no where does he say anything about a burst rate. He is only talks about sustained rate. You all go off on fan boyism and such but you don't know fact from fiction. If you don't know what you are talking about then why try? :?