ata controllers

[beccabob]

dell dimension 4400. came with a 40 GB ultra ata-100 and have added a maxtor 160 GB ultra ata-133. use the 40 gb for operating system and the 160 gb mostly for songs & pics. the system DOES seem a little bit slower accessing things. i realize i'm probably limited to the slower of the 2 hd's (ata-100), but does anyone make a better ide controller that will help increase speed or am i just goona hafta settle for it as is? i believe i have them set cable select with the 40 gb being the boss. thanks in advance for any help!! :•)

 

[blah]

I don't think you have any cash to throw for 1-2 secs loading time, but you do need a 133 controller for drive over 137Gs. Set your HDs to be one master, one slave, no cable select. Plus what can be "seem" not always real.

..this is very useful and helpful place for information...

 

[grafixmonkey]

Just to mention, you would not get any performance improvement from ATA133 unless you're copying lots of stuff from one to the other (maybe not even then) because a single hard drive doesn't even approach the transfer capacity of an ATA100 cable. The only issue would be properly getting at a disk above 137GB, if you do indeed need ATA133 for large hard drives (I hadn't heard that before, myself, but I don't know either way.)