ATA-66 vs. ATA-100(133)

[dreamliner77]

Rebuilding an old computer and having some design questions. I have 2 hard drives to go in ATA 100 and ATA 133. The Mobo is rated at ATA 66. I also have a SIIG ATA 133 pci card. How much of a performance increase am I gonna see if I use the ATA card as opposed to running off the mobo? (I'm already jaded because the ATA card adds a good minute or so to the boot time, If the increase is great, then I might use the card, if it's negligable, then I won't bother)

 

[Tyinsar]

from what I recall current ATA drives can't maintain tranfer rates above fifty-something anyway (with the possible exception of the "latest greatest" 10,000rpm units). You might gain a little in burst speed (from onboard cache hits) but little else - I'd stick with the mobo.

 

[dreamliner77]

that's what I thought

 

[NetRyder]

My old desktop at home has a motherboard that supports a max of ATA-66, while the hard disk itself is ATA-100. I remember buying a Promise ATA/133 IDE controller several months ago to see if it really made a difference.
Apart from numbers going up in benchmarks (do these things ever mean anything EVER?), there was little to no real world performance gain as far as I could tell.
I returned the card a few days later.

 

[dreamliner77]

Eh, the card was a freebie. No big loss. I could use to add more drives, but think I'm just gonna use a spare 60 for back up and stuff.


/offtopic

NetRyder, do you ever sleep?

 

[NetRyder]

/offtopic
NetRyder, do you ever sleep?

Hahaha...I was asked this same question a few days ago.

http://www.osnn.net/forum/showpost.php?p=36278&postcount=3

Am I really around here all that much? I never realized. But yeah, it's around 12:00 AM here, and I should be going to sleep in an hour max. Last day of spring break...it's back to class from tomorrow.

 

[LeeJend]

Depends on the CPU clock and FSB too. If they're slow a little more delay form the HD won't matter. BUT, regardless of CPU speed adding a minute to boot time is unacceptably offensive. YUK, sell that card to someone you don't like. Use the money to buy more RAM. Once the software loads into RAM who cares what the HD speed is.

 

[dreamliner77]

It's slow P3 1gHz and 133 ram.

My next question. The two drives I will be using are a Maxtor 60 gig 2mb and a Seagate 120 gig 8mb. I know conventional wisdom says to use the Seagate as the primary drive, but I also do alot of audio recording/editing and none of that stuff touches the c: drive (except program access). (And yes, I will use multiple partitions) What should I use for primary and secondary?