Western Digital HDD's, Aint this just a kick in the....

Maveric169

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Well I guess you learn something new everyday. For about ohhh the last 3 months I have trying to figurare out why I could not get my primary HDD to go into UDMA mode 6. I just assumed that the WD 80GB drive just didn't have the technology supported when it was made as it was about 3 years old.

Well after my recent HDD failure I bought a new WD 160GB HDD w/8MB Cache and figurared that this newer drive would definatly support UDMA mode 6. But yet again, no matter what I tried I could not get the drive into UDMA 6. So back to the manufacture, after crawling through their site for about an hour I came across a startling revelation!

Western Digital currently only manufacturers ATA/100 drives. We have chosen to focus on our 7200-RPM drive family utilizing the ATA/100 bus. Since the ATA/133 burst rate is only one of the factors involved, alone it is not an accurate gauge of drive performance. All other things being equal (RPM, cache size, areal density, etc.), an ATA/100 drive will perform as well, under real world conditions, as an ATA/133 drive.
And so dies my quest to get my primary drive into UDMA mode 6!:cry:
 
You're not really missing much. It's only the initial burst transfer rate that's really affected. The difference in sustained transfer rates of large files isn't all that big. I've used drives at both ATA/100 and 133, and I've never noticed a significant difference.
 
True.dat

Most HDD's can only sustain a 35-45Mbps data transfer in optimal conditions.
 
Well I know back when I had my Maxtor drive as of OS drive with UDMA 6 my comp booted and loaded to the desktop much quicker than it does now. I never noticed any other difference in performance, just agravating waiting 2 mins to load on startups. But such is life, still better than back in DOS days.
 
were you booting from hibernation? That WOULD do it! Have to say that even with my new SATA drive the top rate I get from HDTach is around 100 MB/s sustained - so SATA still sticks at UDMA5.

I think it is the next genberation we are after to see the big jump - and they are going to cost so I will not be going there for two or three years maybe when we see the cost/GB become reasonable
 
Cheap, high-capacity solid-state drives.
Ah, that'll be the day. :D
 
I have an ATA100 Segate 120GB 8mb cache and an ATA133 80GB MAxtor 8mb cache, the seagate is faster.

No point in ata133 :p
 
Aren't HD boxes labeled with either ATA100 or ATA133 these days?
 
Dunno, I have never bought a boxed HD.


:D
 
didn't know UDMA 6 existed. lol. thought UDMA 5 was the latest.
 
From ATA100 (mode 5) upwards there is no significant performance increase in actual usage that can be detected by any user running any application under XP or 200 or NT.

ATA133 (mode 6) with an eight meg cache does not provide any significant increase in performance at all when looked at by the user, it’s of technical significance only. This also applies to SATA drives which in effect perform no quicker than ATA drives (yet). The technical differences are not measurable in “real” systems but will be soon.

All IDE drives no matter what standard they conform to are “knackered” by their lack of intelligence in relation to “SCSI” drives which have an on-board CPU (of sorts) so can accept messages from the OS and act on them without generating any interrupts.

Soon all hard drives of the mechanical variety will be obsolete anyway as solid sate devices become the mainstream. They are on the way.

:) :)
 
dave holbon said:
Soon all hard drives of the mechanical variety will be obsolete anyway as solid sate devices become the mainstream. They are on the way.

Cant wait
:)
 
dave holbon said:
From ATA100 (mode 5) upwards there is no significant performance increase in actual usage that can be detected by any user running any application under XP or 200 or NT.

ATA133 (mode 6) with an eight meg cache does not provide any significant increase in performance at all when looked at by the user, it’s of technical significance only. This also applies to SATA drives which in effect perform no quicker than ATA drives (yet). The technical differences are not measurable in “real” systems but will be soon.

All IDE drives no matter what standard they conform to are “knackered” by their lack of intelligence in relation to “SCSI” drives which have an on-board CPU (of sorts) so can accept messages from the OS and act on them without generating any interrupts.

Soon all hard drives of the mechanical variety will be obsolete anyway as solid sate devices become the mainstream. They are on the way.

:) :)
Do you by chance have any reading sources WRT solid state drives?
 

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Also Hi EP and people. I found this place again while looking through a oooollllllldddd backup. I have filled over 10TB and was looking at my collection of antiques. Any bids on the 500Mhz Win 95 fix?
Any of the SP crew still out there?
Xie wrote on Electronic Punk's profile.
Impressed you have kept this alive this long EP! So many sites have come and gone. :(

Just did some crude math and I apparently joined almost 18yrs ago, how is that possible???
hello peeps... is been some time since i last came here.
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Rest in peace my friend, been trying to find you and finally did in the worst way imaginable.

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