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<b>BASIC HDD FAQ</b></font color=blue>
<b>Rev 1.5, 6 November 2002.</b>
<b>01. Is ATA133 better than ATA100?</b>
No, not usually. The maximum sustained transfer rates for current IDE drives is around 40 to 50Mb/sec, well below the limitations of either ata100 or 133. Only data burst speeds are favourably effected by the increased bandwidth, and burst speeds only have a very limited effect on overall performance. The main benefits of ATA133 are: Combined bandwidth for 2 drives on the same channel is increased and ATA133 allows native use of drives over 127Gb in capacity (an ata100 limitation) Note: The latest revision of ATA100 now supports 48bit addressing thus drives over 127Gb capacity.
<b>02. Is a ATA100/133 drive backwards compatible?</b>
Yes. All ATA drives are backwards compatible with PIO/DMA/ATA33/66/100. Just bear in mind that you will be limited to the slowest component, and older motherboards/systems often have inherent capacity limitations.
e.g. Motherboards of Pentium 2 vintage (ATA33) often cannot handle drives over 33.8Gb (BIOS limitation).
<b>03. IDE ribbon cables? 40/80 wire, flat/bendy, whats the deal?</b>
There are two types of IDE cables and come in two shapes. 40wire IDE cables cannot go higher than ATA33. These are becomming obselete. Newer 80wire cables are better as they can handle ATA66/100 and 133 speeds. IDE cables can also be "rounded" (rolled up). rounded cables work exactly the same, but their shape means they are easier to bend, look neater, and often improve case airflow by taking up less room.
<b>04. My Hard drive is Really slow! Whats wrong?</b>
By far the most common cause of this is Windows disabling the UDMA transfer protocol. This can usually be fixed by going to the control pannel, system, then device manager and checking the UDMA status of the primary and secondary IDE channels. Also check that write caching is enabled on each drive. It's also a good idea to make sure that the drives have UDMA enabled in the BIOS also.
<b>05. Whats Better FAT32 or NTFS?</b>
That depends who you ask. [image]/images/community/icons/smile.gif[/image] FAT32 is reported to be faster by around 5%, but NTFS has the advantages of: A. Being able to handle file sizes over 4Gb. B. Better diagnostic and error correction abilities C. Better able to handle large drive sizes (>40Gb) and NTFS uses far smaller cluster sizes. NOTE: Win98 and WinME cannot natively read NTFS drives/partitions. Linux can read NTFS but not write.
<b>06. CLICK CLICK CLICK or GRIND GRIND GRIND! Whats wrong???</b>
Backup Your data <font color=red>NOW!</font color=red> Noises such as these means that your drive has failed, or is about to.
<b>07. My hard drive has developed Bad sectors! What should i do?</b>
Firstly backup all your critical data fast! Then you have a choice. You can reformat the drive using the manufacturers diagnostic utility which marks bad sectors as bad and no longer uses them to store data. This however <b>does not</b> prevent further bad sectors from developing. And its almost guaranteed that you will get more at a later date. The better solution is to replace the drive, or send it back (RMA it) if it is still under warantee.
<b>08. Is it ok to have 2 IDE drives on one cable?</b>
Yes it is, but bear in mind that you are sharing the bandwidth of the cable & controller equally. Thus you may loose performance, especially when copying from one drive to the other.
If you have two modern (fast) IDE drives you may see better performance with each drive on a dedicated IDE channel. Care must also be exercised when dealing with Hard drives and Optical drives. Ideally for maximum performance you would want each hard drive to have its own cable, with any optical drives sharing a seperate cable. This can be a complex balancing issue, so read the following 2 links for more details.
<A HREF="http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confPerformance-c.html" target="_new">http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confPerformance-c.html</A>
<A HREF="http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confRecommendations-c.html" target="_new">http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confRecommendations-c.html</A>
Authors Layout:
Primary IDE channel - Main HDD only.
Secondary IDE channel - DVD master & CD-RW slave.
Onboard RAID channel 1 - backup HDD.
<b>09. I purchaced a 40Gb drive. Why do i only get 38Gb of free space?</b>
Now this is an odd one. Basically its to do with Math. Drive manufacturers count capacity in decimal:
i.e. 1 Gb = 1,000 Mb = 1,000,000,000 bytes.
But the computer system and software typically counts capacity in binary, so 1 Gb = 1024 Mb = 1,073,741,824.
Thus a 40Gb drive will read around 37 to 38 Gb of free space, bearing in mind that a small amount is allways lost in the formatting process to the file system as well.
<b>0A. Can i run an ATA33 drive with a ata66/100/133 drive on the same cable without performance loss?</b>
Yes and No, depending on the age of your system and the motherboard it uses.
All modern IDE controllers support Independent Device Timing (IDT). This means that two drives designed to work at different speeds <b>WILL</b> do so. IDT was first introduced (as far as we can tell) with the Intel 430HX Triton II chipset that supported ATA33. But not all chipsets from that era supported IDT. e.g. the 430HX and TX supported IDT, but not the FX or VX.
And of course, normal limitations apply. A ata100 drive will not run at ata100 speeds if the controller only supports ata33 or 66. Additionally remember that you are still sharing the total bandwidth of that channel.
<b>0B. Western Digital drives with 8Mb cache... Are they better?</b>
Yes. Allthough there seems to be much heated debate on exactly how the performance gains are achieved. The increase of the onboard cache size from 2mb to 8mb seems to aid the efficiency of the read/write process, especially when dealing with lots of small read/write requests/files. Drive firmware optimisations also play a significan role.
Of course to get a drive with 8Mb cache you must pay a premium. [image]/images/community/icons/smile.gif[/image]
Additionally, since the start of October the drives from W.D. with 8Mb cache retain the 3 year parantee, with Seagate and Maxtor planning on following suite with their 8Mb cache offerings.
<b>0C. Fluid Vs Ballbearing drives? Whats better?</b>
Hard drives with fluid dynamic bearing motors (FDB) are <i>very</i> new, and are still only available in limited quantities. The use of FDB on high end SCSI drives with 5 year warantees seems to indicate that the companies have confidence in their long term reliability.
To date, lab testing on a number of review sites has indicated that the FDB drives run quieter than ball bearing drives, by about 3dBA on average. Have yet to see any hard data that proves that the FDB drives run any cooler than contemporary drives. Both Maxtor and Seagate currently produce IDE deives with fluid bearings.
<b>0D. Are 7200rpm drives better than 5400rpm?</b>
Definately Yes. Faster rotation speeds gives quicker seek times (drive is more responsive) and also greater read/write speeds (Max sustained data transfer rate). There are a few downsides for faster spinning hard drives including increased noise (higher pitch), heat output and a slightly lower data density. With modern IDE drives however these downsides are typically insignificant unless you desire a completely silent system.
<b>0E. For Questions about RAID please see the RAID FAQ.</b>
<b>0F. SCSI vs IDE?</b>
Too complex a topic for this <i>basic</i> FAQ. For further reading i suggest you click here: <A HREF="http://www.byte.com/art/9403/sec6/art6.htm" target="_new">SCSI vs IDE</A>, or here: <A HREF="http://www.acc.umu.se/~sagge/scsi_ide/" target="_new">more SCSI vs IDE</A>. Some other very good SCSI links are:
<A HREF="http://scsifaq.org:9080/scsi_faq" target="_new">Gary Field's SCSI Info Central</A>
<A HREF="http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/scsi" target="_new">PC Guide</A>
<A HREF="http://scsi.radified.com/scsi_01.htm" target="_new">Radified Guide to SCSI</A>
<A HREF="http://www.paralan.com/glos.html" target="_new">SCSI Glossary</A>
<b>Additional stuff</b>
<A HREF="http://www.storagereview.com" target="_new">http://www.storagereview.com</A> - a good place for new drive rewiews, discussions, old articles and their own forum.
Comments, suggestions, additions, spam, flames et al please message me or send an email to: <A HREF="mailto:LHGPooBaa@hotmail.com">LHGPooBaa@hotmail.com</A>
<b>Acknowledgments</b>
This FAQ would not be possible without the kind help of the following individuals.
<b><font color=orange>Toejam31</font color=orange></b>
<b><font color=green>FatBurger</font color=green></b>
<b><font color=blue>Camieabz</font color=blue></b>
<b><font color=purple>jc14all</font color=purple></b>
<b><font color=blue>Slickstaa</font color=blue></b>
<b><font color=blue>Matisaro</font color=blue></b>
<b><font color=purple>HammerBot</font color=purple><b>
<b><font color=red>FREDI</font color=red></b>
<b>FAQ History</b>
Ver 1.0 - Initial draft.
Ver 1.1 - Revised draft.
Ver 1.2 - Finalised first release, 23 July 2002.
Ver 1.3 - First revision, 5 August 2002.
Ver 1.4 - Update + Remove RAID info, 29 August 2002.<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by LHGPooBaa on 11/05/02 06:35 PM.</EM></FONT></P>
<b>Rev 1.5, 6 November 2002.</b>
<b>01. Is ATA133 better than ATA100?</b>
No, not usually. The maximum sustained transfer rates for current IDE drives is around 40 to 50Mb/sec, well below the limitations of either ata100 or 133. Only data burst speeds are favourably effected by the increased bandwidth, and burst speeds only have a very limited effect on overall performance. The main benefits of ATA133 are: Combined bandwidth for 2 drives on the same channel is increased and ATA133 allows native use of drives over 127Gb in capacity (an ata100 limitation) Note: The latest revision of ATA100 now supports 48bit addressing thus drives over 127Gb capacity.
<b>02. Is a ATA100/133 drive backwards compatible?</b>
Yes. All ATA drives are backwards compatible with PIO/DMA/ATA33/66/100. Just bear in mind that you will be limited to the slowest component, and older motherboards/systems often have inherent capacity limitations.
e.g. Motherboards of Pentium 2 vintage (ATA33) often cannot handle drives over 33.8Gb (BIOS limitation).
<b>03. IDE ribbon cables? 40/80 wire, flat/bendy, whats the deal?</b>
There are two types of IDE cables and come in two shapes. 40wire IDE cables cannot go higher than ATA33. These are becomming obselete. Newer 80wire cables are better as they can handle ATA66/100 and 133 speeds. IDE cables can also be "rounded" (rolled up). rounded cables work exactly the same, but their shape means they are easier to bend, look neater, and often improve case airflow by taking up less room.
<b>04. My Hard drive is Really slow! Whats wrong?</b>
By far the most common cause of this is Windows disabling the UDMA transfer protocol. This can usually be fixed by going to the control pannel, system, then device manager and checking the UDMA status of the primary and secondary IDE channels. Also check that write caching is enabled on each drive. It's also a good idea to make sure that the drives have UDMA enabled in the BIOS also.
<b>05. Whats Better FAT32 or NTFS?</b>
That depends who you ask. [image]/images/community/icons/smile.gif[/image] FAT32 is reported to be faster by around 5%, but NTFS has the advantages of: A. Being able to handle file sizes over 4Gb. B. Better diagnostic and error correction abilities C. Better able to handle large drive sizes (>40Gb) and NTFS uses far smaller cluster sizes. NOTE: Win98 and WinME cannot natively read NTFS drives/partitions. Linux can read NTFS but not write.
<b>06. CLICK CLICK CLICK or GRIND GRIND GRIND! Whats wrong???</b>
Backup Your data <font color=red>NOW!</font color=red> Noises such as these means that your drive has failed, or is about to.
<b>07. My hard drive has developed Bad sectors! What should i do?</b>
Firstly backup all your critical data fast! Then you have a choice. You can reformat the drive using the manufacturers diagnostic utility which marks bad sectors as bad and no longer uses them to store data. This however <b>does not</b> prevent further bad sectors from developing. And its almost guaranteed that you will get more at a later date. The better solution is to replace the drive, or send it back (RMA it) if it is still under warantee.
<b>08. Is it ok to have 2 IDE drives on one cable?</b>
Yes it is, but bear in mind that you are sharing the bandwidth of the cable & controller equally. Thus you may loose performance, especially when copying from one drive to the other.
If you have two modern (fast) IDE drives you may see better performance with each drive on a dedicated IDE channel. Care must also be exercised when dealing with Hard drives and Optical drives. Ideally for maximum performance you would want each hard drive to have its own cable, with any optical drives sharing a seperate cable. This can be a complex balancing issue, so read the following 2 links for more details.
<A HREF="http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confPerformance-c.html" target="_new">http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confPerformance-c.html</A>
<A HREF="http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confRecommendations-c.html" target="_new">http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confRecommendations-c.html</A>
Authors Layout:
Primary IDE channel - Main HDD only.
Secondary IDE channel - DVD master & CD-RW slave.
Onboard RAID channel 1 - backup HDD.
<b>09. I purchaced a 40Gb drive. Why do i only get 38Gb of free space?</b>
Now this is an odd one. Basically its to do with Math. Drive manufacturers count capacity in decimal:
i.e. 1 Gb = 1,000 Mb = 1,000,000,000 bytes.
But the computer system and software typically counts capacity in binary, so 1 Gb = 1024 Mb = 1,073,741,824.
Thus a 40Gb drive will read around 37 to 38 Gb of free space, bearing in mind that a small amount is allways lost in the formatting process to the file system as well.
<b>0A. Can i run an ATA33 drive with a ata66/100/133 drive on the same cable without performance loss?</b>
Yes and No, depending on the age of your system and the motherboard it uses.
All modern IDE controllers support Independent Device Timing (IDT). This means that two drives designed to work at different speeds <b>WILL</b> do so. IDT was first introduced (as far as we can tell) with the Intel 430HX Triton II chipset that supported ATA33. But not all chipsets from that era supported IDT. e.g. the 430HX and TX supported IDT, but not the FX or VX.
And of course, normal limitations apply. A ata100 drive will not run at ata100 speeds if the controller only supports ata33 or 66. Additionally remember that you are still sharing the total bandwidth of that channel.
<b>0B. Western Digital drives with 8Mb cache... Are they better?</b>
Yes. Allthough there seems to be much heated debate on exactly how the performance gains are achieved. The increase of the onboard cache size from 2mb to 8mb seems to aid the efficiency of the read/write process, especially when dealing with lots of small read/write requests/files. Drive firmware optimisations also play a significan role.
Of course to get a drive with 8Mb cache you must pay a premium. [image]/images/community/icons/smile.gif[/image]
Additionally, since the start of October the drives from W.D. with 8Mb cache retain the 3 year parantee, with Seagate and Maxtor planning on following suite with their 8Mb cache offerings.
<b>0C. Fluid Vs Ballbearing drives? Whats better?</b>
Hard drives with fluid dynamic bearing motors (FDB) are <i>very</i> new, and are still only available in limited quantities. The use of FDB on high end SCSI drives with 5 year warantees seems to indicate that the companies have confidence in their long term reliability.
To date, lab testing on a number of review sites has indicated that the FDB drives run quieter than ball bearing drives, by about 3dBA on average. Have yet to see any hard data that proves that the FDB drives run any cooler than contemporary drives. Both Maxtor and Seagate currently produce IDE deives with fluid bearings.
<b>0D. Are 7200rpm drives better than 5400rpm?</b>
Definately Yes. Faster rotation speeds gives quicker seek times (drive is more responsive) and also greater read/write speeds (Max sustained data transfer rate). There are a few downsides for faster spinning hard drives including increased noise (higher pitch), heat output and a slightly lower data density. With modern IDE drives however these downsides are typically insignificant unless you desire a completely silent system.
<b>0E. For Questions about RAID please see the RAID FAQ.</b>
<b>0F. SCSI vs IDE?</b>
Too complex a topic for this <i>basic</i> FAQ. For further reading i suggest you click here: <A HREF="http://www.byte.com/art/9403/sec6/art6.htm" target="_new">SCSI vs IDE</A>, or here: <A HREF="http://www.acc.umu.se/~sagge/scsi_ide/" target="_new">more SCSI vs IDE</A>. Some other very good SCSI links are:
<A HREF="http://scsifaq.org:9080/scsi_faq" target="_new">Gary Field's SCSI Info Central</A>
<A HREF="http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/scsi" target="_new">PC Guide</A>
<A HREF="http://scsi.radified.com/scsi_01.htm" target="_new">Radified Guide to SCSI</A>
<A HREF="http://www.paralan.com/glos.html" target="_new">SCSI Glossary</A>
<b>Additional stuff</b>
<A HREF="http://www.storagereview.com" target="_new">http://www.storagereview.com</A> - a good place for new drive rewiews, discussions, old articles and their own forum.
Comments, suggestions, additions, spam, flames et al please message me or send an email to: <A HREF="mailto:LHGPooBaa@hotmail.com">LHGPooBaa@hotmail.com</A>
<b>Acknowledgments</b>
This FAQ would not be possible without the kind help of the following individuals.
<b><font color=orange>Toejam31</font color=orange></b>
<b><font color=green>FatBurger</font color=green></b>
<b><font color=blue>Camieabz</font color=blue></b>
<b><font color=purple>jc14all</font color=purple></b>
<b><font color=blue>Slickstaa</font color=blue></b>
<b><font color=blue>Matisaro</font color=blue></b>
<b><font color=purple>HammerBot</font color=purple><b>
<b><font color=red>FREDI</font color=red></b>
<b>FAQ History</b>
Ver 1.0 - Initial draft.
Ver 1.1 - Revised draft.
Ver 1.2 - Finalised first release, 23 July 2002.
Ver 1.3 - First revision, 5 August 2002.
Ver 1.4 - Update + Remove RAID info, 29 August 2002.<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by LHGPooBaa on 11/05/02 06:35 PM.</EM></FONT></P>
), and might be pushing to have support for their file-systems removed from Linux and other Operating Systems.
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