I copied the key paragraphs from this week's email letter from Other World Computing on ATA controller cards and hard disk buffers as they relate to start-up times and read/write performance. This info is very valuable to me as I was considering upgrading from a Sonnet ATA/66 card to a 100 or 133 one. Turns out there is very little performance increase over the 66 or even the stock bus! The a real difference in increasing performance is the transfer speed of the hard disk, not the bus. Read on for the details:
************************** Upgrading HD Performance ************************* From: OWC Larry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "OWCSpecials" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> When it comes to hard drives, there are two questions that I see on a regular basis. The first question is how much faster is an ATA/133 than an ATA/66 PCI controller. The other question is whether that 'jumbo' 8MB buffer makes difference over the more standard 2MB buffer found on the majority of drives out there. ---------------------------------- #1 - How much faster will the ATA/133 PCI card be compared to the ATA/66 or my machines stock controller? An ATA/66 Controller card is able to sustain up to 66 Megabytes per Second across the channel. An ATA/133 card sustains up to 133 Megabytes per Second. There is no single drive made today that transfers data faster than 66 Megs per second. As you may have already guessed, the real world results show that there really isn't much difference between an ATA/133 and a ATA/66 controller UNLESS you are using multiple drives setup to work together in a RAID configuration. Although, even there other limitations to limit the real gains you may expect. ---------------------------------- In all of these tests, the stock ATA-2 controller was smoked significantly. ATA-2 has a max data rate of 16 Megabytes per Second and both drives had plenty more performance there for the taking which both the ATA/66 and ATA/133 cards had no trouble showing. ---------------------------------- The Sustained read results are the most interesting. The Acard ATA/66 card was the slowest of the three PCI cards with a sustained a read rate almost 51 Megs per second from the IBM drive. The Sonnet Trio was the fastest, but just barely turning in a sustained rate of just over 53 Megs/s and the SIIG ATA/133 card was in the middle, just a little faster than the Acard, coming in with just over 51 Megs/s. The sustained write results go all over the place due to the interaction of cache. The Data Buffer each drive has is lightning fast compared to the rate at which a drive actually hard writes the data. With the IBM Drive, the Acard ATA/66 actually came out on top, Sonnet second, and the SIIG in third. With the Western Digital which has the larger 8MB buffer the SIIG came on top, with the Acard second, and the Sonnet in last. ---------------------------------- For startup time, you can see that there is very little difference to be achieved comparing any of the cards to the stock Bus. Sonnet produced the quickest startup times, but where the average startup time was about 1 Minute, the Sonnet card was at best only 4.55 seconds faster than the slowest start up time. A new, more modern hard drive alone is going to make your computer start up faster - the ATA interface it is attached to isn't going to be a huge factor there. The file duplication test gives a pretty good real world expectation for interface performance. All three PCI ATA Cards approached being twice as fast in this test as compared to the Beige G3 Stock ATA-2. But comparing the difference between the ATA/133 cards and the ATA/66 results in the ATA/66 being at worst not even 10% slower than the fasted of the ATA/133 cards. _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ Ed Stewart, Colorado Rocky Mountains <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Personal website at: <http://www.skymtn.com/> Updated 8/27/02 -- StarMax is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... / Buy books, CDs, videos, and more from Amazon.com \ / <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home/lowendmac> \ Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> StarMax list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/starmax.html> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/starmax%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
