"Moe Hair" said in news:
[email protected]:
I would like to add a 40 or 80 gig hard drive to my Dell XPS 400 with
an Intel SE440BX motherboard (running on Windows 2000). Is a ATA 133
card compatible and will it help recognize a larger hard drive. The
Dell tech support line (which is always wrong these days) says the
largest hard drive the board can currently read is 16 gig. However,
they also told me I couldn't run Windows 2000 which I'm doing with no
problems.
Any help is appreciated.
I had a 3+ year-old AOpen AX6BC motherboard with a Slot1 Pentium3 800MHz
E (enhanced on-die cache). The mobo use the Intel 440BX chipset. It
was a rock solid performer. However, the mobo's IDE ports (because of
the 440BX chipset) only supported ATA-4 (UDMA mode 2 for 33MB/s). That
was fine for my first couple of hard drives but eventually I ended up
with two 40GB hard drives with one at UltraDMA-100 spinning at 7200RPM
(used for the OS and apps) and the other at UltraDMA-66 spinning at
5400RPM (for data).
I went with the Promise Ultra100 IDE controller card to provide better
support of the drives. It also allowed me to put the driver-only
supported ATAPI devices (CD-RW and DVD-ROM) each on their own IDE
channel using the mobo's IDE ports and move the hard drives to the
UltraDMA-100 capable controller card and each on its own channel there.
Unfortunately, this card was a bit flaky. On most boots, both drives
were detected. On occasion, however, the 2nd hard drive got missed. A
warm reboot wouldn't work. A cold reboot was needed to have the POST
have the CPU issue a reset signal to all devices to put the Promise
controller in a known and base state. When I went to sell the old 440BX
box, I decided to remove the Promise card since I figured the buyer
wouldn't like a flaky card and would prefer usability and stability over
speed. However, I immediately noticed the drop in performance. So I
went to eBay and bought a Promise Ultra100 TX2 controller card. Many
users that buy the Western Digital drives over 120GB in size would get
this controller included in the drive package. They didn't need it so
they would sell it off cheap at eBay. I got one for $25 (after shipping
costs were added). This card worked great and the drives were at top
speed again.
The only caveat when using an IDE controller card, or even a SCSI
controller, is that during the install of NT-based Windows that you need
to hit F6 to tell it that you will later be loading the drivers for that
controller. Since the IDE and SCSI controllers have their own BIOS and
perform the geometric translation between the OS and the hard drives,
they all get treated like SCSI controllers. You hit F6 near the very
beginning of the install and later you get prompted to insert the floppy
with the driver for the BIOS-controlled host controller adapter. If you
don't hit F6, you won't get prompted, and the setup will eventually
report that no mass storage devices (i.e., hard drives) were found.
Unfortunately, the OS doesn't then remember to use those "SCSI" drivers
when booting into Recovery Console mode (used on occasion to fix a
broken system) and you'll again have to remember to hit F6 and insert
the floppy.
You will notice a speed boost going from UltraDMA-33 to UltraDMA-66.
From UltraDMA-66 and up, you'll see little improvement. While the
hardware benchmarks showed my drives were much faster on the Promise
card, the ones more important are the application benchmarks to emulate
real-world use. Because I kept my drives defragmented, and by having
each on its own channel by using separate IDE ports for every drive,
what was most noticeable was an improved snappiness in loading an
application due to the higher burst speed supported. I'm not running a
file server or SQL database that is in continual use so sustained
bandwidth for the drives isn't the issue; the OS and apps, once they got
read from the hard drive and loaded, won't run faster with drives faster
than UDMA-66, and the difference from UDMA-33 to UDMA-66 is measurable
but slight, like around 5% to 10% faster. But what I liked most about
using the Promise controller and getting the faster burst mode support
was that the OS and apps loaded faster. Windows got more snappy. That
was enough to make me happy and I figured it would please the buyer, so
the $25 was worth the expense, especially since the buyer was family.
)