Hard Drive

[decibelrebel]

What is better...ATA66 or ATA100? Prices seem to be more for one or the other depending on company..

[Benjamin. G]

Just think of the numbers like miles per hour for your data. 100 obviously wins, but it only does 100 if your motherboard supports such reckless driving, or if you plug it into an ATA100 controller card in a PCI slot. The drive should work on a 66 board though (at 66), so is worth considering as future proofing.

[mechlayn]

actually to be honest ide drives themselves have just eclipsed that transfer capapbilities of ata-33 and are around 40MB/sec right now. www.storagereview.com has a large database showing this. while the interface is capable of 100 meg speeds the drives simply are not able to actually pass data the quick the future prrofing is not really an issue. The hinderance is that ide drives max out at 7400 rpm. That needs to come up to at least 10k rpm before they will touch the limits of ata-66. so look closely at the specs of the drive in terms of seek times because many ata-66 drives at 7400 rpl can and do match their ata-100 brethern. shop around too. again check www.storagereview.com and decide for yourself. I myself have 2 ata-66 drives the routinly benchmark on par in all areas with many more expensive ata-100 drives.