Replace ATA Card w/ Primary Drive?

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Sorry to be posting so often lately Mr. Moderator, but I’m about to dive into some serious work; & need some advice. A few months ago, I added a secondary hard drive to my system (A Dell 700; & the drive was a Maxtor 60GB.) I do a lot of work with digital multitracking; & use the drive exclusively for audio files. The drive was an ATA/133, which I was told will work fine in my ATA/100 system (& it does.) Now, my primary drive is getting noisy & slow; & I purchased another Maxtor, a 40GB; & also a 133. My questions are: A) Now that both drives are going to be 133’s, will they both work in my 100 system?; & Should I upgrade the card to a 133 anyway? I am running 512MB of SD/RAM, but with a PIII 700, what should I do, stay with the 100 Card (Ultra) or upgrade to the 133. Thanks.

mark4man

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a) Both 133 rated drives will work in your 100 based system. The nice thing about ATA is that all previous versions will work on a faster device chain.

Should you upgrade? Well, that’s a personal preference. I wouldn’t because I really don’t think the performance gain will make it worth the time and effort, and who knows what technology will come along in a few months that might make your purchase not as wise. I would love to meet someone who can tell the difference between 100 and 133, much as I would like to know if anyone can really tell the difference between a PII 800 and a PIII 1000 – in the real world that is.

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If your system bus runs at 100MHz, I think buying a 133MHz add-in card doesn’t do anything for you. Either your 100MHz system bus is the bottleneck, or, more likely, the system is waiting on the hard drive. Either way, the speed of the controller card’s bus interface shouldn’t make any difference.

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