Is a pci ata133 IDE card as fast as mobo ata 133 IDE?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Adiabatic
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A

Adiabatic

I have a Promise Ultra133 TX2 controller. In trying various cable
routing was wondering if placing any hard drives here would effect
their performance vs the on board IDE ports?
 
I have a Promise Ultra133 TX2 controller. In trying various cable
routing was wondering if placing any hard drives here would effect
their performance vs the on board IDE ports?
Click to expand...

I doubt it and you should actually gain speed in certain file
operations if you place all your devices on separate IDE ports however
some PCI add-on cards of this ilk do not like or support Aoatapi
Devices like Cdrom drivers.See manual.
HTH :)



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Adiabatic said:
I have a Promise Ultra133 TX2 controller. In trying various cable
routing was wondering if placing any hard drives here would effect
their performance vs the on board IDE ports?
Click to expand...


Depending on your motherboard, your onboard IDE controller is probably
attached to a high-speed interface such as Hypertransport or V-Link or
the like. If your PCI bus is already heavily taxed, then it might be
a good idea to keep your drives on the onboard controller.

If you have more than two hard drives, then by all means spill over to
the PCI controller. (IDE's inability to simultaneously access two
devices on one channel is much more significant than the difference in
PCI bus traffic)


-WD
 
A highly utilized PCI bus does not affect ATA drives as much as you
would think. I have tested this with devices that eat up the entire PCI
bandwidth.

Usually, PCI disk controller cards are faster due to more aggressive
performance optimizations by third-party mfg's, while, in the case of
Intel chipsets, Intel tends to play it safe (don't know about VIA). My
tests have shown that HighPoint and Promise cards bench faster than the
Intel on-board IDE controllers. Typically between 5% and 12% faster.

However, sometimes the third-party cards can be slower due to buggy
firmware and/or drivers.

I'm willing to bet that your Promise controller will outperform the
on-board controller.

Reasons to use your Promise controller:

- Better cable routing (in your situation).
- Usually better performance.
- No worries or hassles due to 137 GB ATA limit (> 137 GB ATA requires
W2K SP3 or XP SP1 and registry change, W98 I believe requires the Intel
Application Accelerator).
- Usually faster performance using disk imaging tools, in DOS, such as
Drive Image (though sometimes slower). If you use a VIA chipset, you may
find that is much slower than your Promise card in DOS mode.

Reasons to use your built in ATA controller:

- Convenience
- Saves a PCI slot
- Potentially more reliable
- Better support from third party apps (Acronis True Image is very
hardware specific and does not support my Promise raid controller for
restoring, nor does it support the Intel ICH5R controller and many others).
 
Better bandwidth for me with the ide card. Have a Maxtor/Promise ultra ata
133 card with a 160 gig and 60 gig drive attached. The bios in the card
during boot indicates UDMA 6. The pci ata card also frees up the IDE
channels on my motherboard to plug in a TDK 40X12X48 velocd cd/rw, Sony CRX
300E cdrw/dvd rom(slave) in the primary ide slot, and an NEC ND2500A
dvd-writer in the secondary ide channel. Newer motherboards do have an
onboard solution, (in addition to serial ata channels) but I've found that I
get more flexibility and better performance with the add-in ultra ata card.
You did not specify what type of system, size of hard drive(s)and OS you
were using.

M
 
Better bandwidth for me with the ide card. Have a Maxtor/Promise ultra ata
133 card with a 160 gig and 60 gig drive attached. The bios in the card
during boot indicates UDMA 6. The pci ata card also frees up the IDE
channels on my motherboard to plug in a TDK 40X12X48 velocd cd/rw, Sony CRX
300E cdrw/dvd rom(slave) in the primary ide slot, and an NEC ND2500A
dvd-writer in the secondary ide channel. Newer motherboards do have an
onboard solution, (in addition to serial ata channels) but I've found that I
get more flexibility and better performance with the add-in ultra ata card.
You did not specify what type of system, size of hard drive(s)and OS you
were using.
Click to expand...
I like my Maxtor ultra 133 card as well. Gives me plenty of speed for
the video work I do. I haven't dropped a frame during capture yet.
 
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