Does the P4T533-C support ATA 133?

[letdown]

I was hoping to put one of Maxtor's Ultra ATA 133 HDs into a new system built on an Asus P4T533-C. Am I wrong or does that board only support up to ATA 100?

Maybe this is a dumb question, but I don't know so I'll ask: If it only supports up to 100, can I put an ATA 133 controller into one of my PCI slots and hook that to the HD to get optimal performance? Or should I just buy an ATA 100 HD and shut up?

Thanks

 

[rbertino]

You're right, the Asus P4T533-C does not support ATA133. The reason for this is that Intel doesn't officially support ATA133, so on their chipsets, they still only support ATA100.

The Asus P4T533 (without the C), however, does have an extra on-board RAID controller that does support ATA133, so on the P4T533, you will get the two built-in IDE connections that are ATA100, and two from the RAID controller that are ATA133.

But, as most people on this board will tell you, the ATA133 standard doesn't really improve hard drive performance.

ATA133 is basically a standard that improves the bandwidth of the IDE controllers. ATA100 means 100 MB/s, ATA133 means 133 MB/s. But, modern hard drives are only able to muster, at most, 50 MB/s. So, unless you are using two hard drives on one IDE channel, you would not really see any performance benefits from ATA133.

Most of us (including myself) would recommend that you instead get one of the new Western Digital hard drives with the 8 MB of cache. The extra cache (most hard drives only have about 2 MB), allows it to provide better performance.

For more information, see this Tom's Hardware article:

<A HREF="http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/02q1/020305/index.html" target="_new">http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/02q1/020305/index.html</A>

 

[letdown]

Thanks! Very helpful reply, and a nice link. Eventually I'll stop being a turd and learn a little more about things like this.