ATA 33

[BuStEd]

Does anyone know whether I can put an ATA 66 or 100 harddrive onto my ATA33 motherboard?

If I can how large can the harddrive be? and what speed can it be? (5400 or 7200rpm)

[KenKun]

You can use ATA66 and ATA100 but you will not get the full performance of the drives ... you can use a PCI card to get the full performance of the later mentioned drives ..

If you use the 7200 rpm drive you will see a good loading times boost ..

How larg ? well, i guess that depend on your BIOS version .. i could be wrong though ...

BTW welcome at TechIMO BuStEd

[BuStEd]

What do you mean I won't get the full performance?

Do you mean the speed or what?

[[Neo770]]

Yes, the transfer rates will be a little slower then a ATA-66 controller, but you probably wont notice the difference.

[Fingers]

Hi BuStEd, welcome to TechIMO

ATA66 and ATA100 drives are backward compatible with ATA33 and should work fine.

ATA66 means that the data path from the hard drive controller to the hard drive is physically capable of handling 66Mbytes/sec., but except for what is in the disk cache, even the newest hard drives don't come close to using all this capability. [Neo770] is correct, you probably won't be able to tell the difference between ATA33 and ATA66.

More on the "real world" performance differences between ATA33/66/100 can be found in the short explaination given here:
ATA/100 - Real Performance or Marketing Hype?

[Hellmund]

He's asking more along the lines of what can the ATA33 transfer protocol handle, I know ATA100 is limited to 128gb and ATA133 is necessary to go further. I thought ATA33 was along the 30gb limit....not sure exactly though. Where's otheos and peterM when u need em

[Fingers]

The size of the drive and the rotational speed of the drive are not limited in any way by the PIO mode (ATA mode). The BIOS may have a limitation on how large the hdd can be, but this can be overcome with either a BIOS update, or by using drive overlay software (EZ-Drive) The ATA mode has never imposed any sort of limitation on the rotational speed of the drive.

[Hellmund]

I was reading up on the AT133 standard, I'm sure it mentioned that ATA100 was limited to 128gb of storage...I'd say it would be similar with ATA33. The protocol is the set of rules for communication and I can see how it would affect the amount of addressable space.

[Peter M]

Transfer speed is nothing to do with communication protocol (access method).

The LBA2 protocol required for access beyond 128 GBytes can be done on _any_ IDE controller down to the earliest ISA bus crap.
It just happened to pop up in UDMA133 capable drives first, and the first controller BIOSes to support it are on UDMA133 controllers. Coincidence, no more.

regards, Peter

[Hellmund]

OK...I was way off, I shall have to start learning more about HDD's....thx peter. Sorry fingers