Older Ultra66 Promise card use

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mattrixx
  • Start date Start date
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Mattrixx

I was wondering if an older Ultra66 Promise IDE Card I have salvaged, would
be of any practical use in a more modern ATA 100 system?
I was thinking of using this card to handle my (two) optical drives, thereby
freeing up the Motherboard`s IDE slot for additional HDD`s?
Or should I just scrap this card and look for a more recent Ultra133, and
use the newer Promise card for the HDD`s ?

Thanks in advance

Matt
 
The older card is more than good enough
for optical drives. What are the mobo
specs for the IDEs.
 
I was wondering if an older Ultra66 Promise IDE Card I have salvaged, would
be of any practical use in a more modern ATA 100 system?
Click to expand...

Yes, even most brand new PATA drives don't exceed 66MB/s.
Some do, and the actual throughput is slightly lower than
66MB/s, but practically speaking, it would still be a useful
controller for secondary, supplimental storage. It just
isn't what you'd want to run the OS from nor any other uses
needing utmost performance.

Also, Ultra66 doesn't support 48bit LBA, IIRC, while
Ultra100 or 133 do, so drive size can be a factor.
I was thinking of using this card to handle my (two) optical drives, thereby
freeing up the Motherboard`s IDE slot for additional HDD`s?
Click to expand...

Sounds fine, though I don't recall if it'll allow booting
from the opticals if you don't have a hard drive connected
to that controller too.

Or should I just scrap this card and look for a more recent Ultra133, and
use the newer Promise card for the HDD`s ?
Click to expand...

There would be no benefit to an Ultra133 for optical drives,
none of which come closer to exceeding Ultra66 throughput.
 
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