A Hard Disk In A PCI Slot? The Upgradeware HD25-I/IS

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HD25-IS

The serial ATA variation is similar to the one just presented. Here, as before, a 2.5" UltraATA hard disk is installed. A converter chip (called a bridge) takes care of interfacing the UltraATA/100 of the drive to serial ATA 150 for the PC. Command Queuing and 300 MB/s transfers are not supported.

However, our benchmark results first showed an unpleasant drop in performance. Instead of the expected 34 MB/s for our Western Digital WD800VE, it only had a maximum measurement of around 15 MB/s. We believed the bridge to slows down the drive's transfer rate considerably, but using an nForce4 system instead of our reference test system solved the problem.

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Patrick Schmid
Patrick Schmid
Editor-in-Chief (2005-2006)

Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.