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Member Advice Summary
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Size, seek time, rotation speed, mean time between failure
by JamesCookMD | Jun 06 '00
IDE hard drives are currently sold based on several parameters: size (in gigabytes), seek time (in milliseconds), rotation speed (5400, 7200, or 10000 rpm), buffer size (512k, 1 meg, 2 meg) and specific interface type (ATA/33, ATA/66). Mean time between...Return to opinion
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ATA/33, 66, 100 (Reply to this comment)
by vicwang
"I don't know if current drives spin fast enough to completely saturate these levels of bandwidth, but I suspect so."
I read an article on this recently, which compared ATA/33, 66, and 100 performance with various drives. I don't remember the specific details, but the latest HD's (ex. the IBM Deskstar 75GXP, currently the fastest available) did begin to push past the limits of ATA/66 in best-case situations.
One interesting thing the article mentioned is that, due to the "overhead" of the ATA controller itself, the maximum theoretical bandwidth is actually something like 15% lower (i.e. ATA/66 actually tops out around 55 MB/second).
Also, one of the main benefits of ATA/66 and ATA/100 is when pulling data from the HD's cache. Since that data is not limited by the speed of the HD, transferring data from cache basically happens at the maximum speed of the ATA controller. That's why even slower drives will see SOME benefit from faster ATA's (although anything slower than 7200 RPM will only see a 1-2% performance gain by going from ATA/33 to 66).
-vicwang
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Sep 26 '00
3:42 pm PDT
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