Maxtor ATA 133 drive in ATA 33 machine

[tk1780]

I'm looking at buying a Maxtor 40GB 7200 ATA 133 drive.

My system is older and supports ATA 33.

I'm pretty sure that I can run this drive on my system.

How much slower will ATA 33 be? the STR of the drive is 44mb/sec initially and drops to near 24 mb/sec. My current drive only averages 9 mb/sec so anything will be an improvement.

Also can I/should I use the ATA 66 cable or the original ATA 33 cable.

Thanks,

Tom

[otheos]

If it's on an ATA33 controller, the cable wont make a difference.

Go for it, it will be hugely faster than your current drive, and performance loss due to the controller will not hinder that. Added bonus, in your next upgrade when you can get a new IDE controller based motherboard, you'll also have your drive to work at full throttle.

You're looking at no more tha 20% performance loss, so don't worry too much. And that's only in STR, so nothing to worry really, as most use is random reads writes which will not be affected as bad.

Oh and don't go spending on PCI ATA100/133 controllers, just save for a new motherboard/cpu package later

[thekemp]

but you can get ide controller cards for next to nothing these days the thing is you wont notice much difference like otheos says save up for a newer motherboard !

[vagpap]

The ATA66 cable will only lead to fewer mistakes in data transportation with no visible improvement...

[Ace McGirk]

You will see an improvement in data transfer speeds(due to larger cache and mechanical improvements in the newer drive)even if it is run on an ata33 controller,not as big of an improvement as you would see if you went to ata66 or 100 though.

[tk1780]

Thank you, all

The drive is in about three times as fast as the old drive!!

Thanks!