Rough HDD performance

[mmcelarn]

Hi,
I just found an Hitachi Deskstar for $70 AR, the catch is that it ATA 100. I have a 1 yr old system (my boot drive is SATA) so it's capable of a lot more, but if I splurge for a SATA150 it'll cost about twice as much. I was wondering just how much of a performance hit I would suffer. I'll be using the new drive mostly for transfering, editing and mpeg encoding very large video files ~80GB (from miniDV tapes).
The ATA 100 is a 250GB drive, my main concern is that it's a 40pin IDE so will I be forced to partition the drive (I read sth in the sticky that above 137GB isnt recognized???) I dunno if it has NCQ - probably not eh? I'm confused since the first of the HDD FAQ's said that there's no performance difference between the ATA100 and ATA133 and I read that there isnt much difference between the 133 and the SATA150, so what's your take on it?

 

[folken]

No one hard drive can utilize all the bandwidth a controller can provide. When using only one hard drive ata100 is no faster than sata. You will only utilize that bandwidth if you have a couple hard drives in a raid array.
With a single drive you will only see speed improvements with different hardware in the hard drive, not necissarily using sata over ide. Such as having 8mb of cache instead of 2mb, or having a 10000rpm drive instead of a 7200 or 5400rpm drive.

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[mmcelarn]

thanks for clearing that up! What about the partition issue? Let me quote the first FAQ answer to difference between ATA100 and ATA133 "The main benefits of ATA133 <over ATA100> 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."
So, The specs of the ATA100 drive say the port connector is IDE 40 pin, does this mean that it's one of the older models that are incapable of native support beyond 127GB? I'm reluctant to partition, will this mean that I'm forced to?
M

 

[folken]

I've never heard of that before
I've seen plenty of IDE hard drives over 127gb that are ata100 and ata133. That was probably a limitation of older motherboards or hard drive controllers.
IDE is and always has been 40pin.

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[mmcelarn]

cool! I'm going shoppin!
thanks for the advice, M

 

[Crashman]

ATA100 had a 127GB drive limit, so it was updated to include support for 48-bit addressing. This is a BIOS update and has been present in most new BIOS codes for a couple years.

Windows XP also had a similar limit prior to the release of Service Pack 1.

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[Codesmith]

IDE has always been 40 pins, but to for ATA 66+ you need a 80 pin cable. The extra pins prevent interference allowing for higher speeds.

 

[mmcelarn]

Crashman, you might want to put the information in your post as an edit to the FAQ. I think it's important to attribute the 137GB limit to the BIOS rather than the drive - Mick