Maxtor ATA-133 - PCI \ VOGONS

Maxtor ATA-133 - PCI

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First post, by khyypio

Posted on 2019-09-07, 20:00

khyypio Offline

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So I have the IDE controller in questions and here are my retro-PC specs:
- Abit ST6
- P3 800EB
- 512 Mb
- IDE to SD adapter (https://www.dx.com/p/sd-card-to-ide-hard-driv … AA-LMQp9KBGIMDY)
- Sandisk 64GB Extreme Pro SDXC, UHS-I U3, 170/90 MB/s
- LiteOn SOHD-167T DVD
- LiteOn SOHW-1653S DVD-RW

I don´t really know anything about IDE controllers except that they are suppose to be faster. Do I benefit at all if I install this thing in my retro rig? Are there any disadvantages?

Reply 1 of 3, by dionb

Posted on 2019-09-07, 21:39

dionb Offline

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You do and you don't. The ST6 already has ATA100 integrated. Given you are using a very fast SD card, throughput will be measurably higher with an ATA133 controller - but almost certainly not noticeably so. The main metric for how fast a system feels is the random read performance, which is totally dependent on the 'drive' (SD card) and does not change with controller bandwidth.

Disadvantage to using a PCI controller is that it comes with its own BIOS that delays boot quite a bit. Tbh, I'd say that delay isn't worth the very minimal added sequential read performance you might get.

Reply 2 of 3, by khyypio

Posted on 2019-09-11, 09:05

khyypio Offline

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dionb wrote:
You do and you don't. The ST6 already has ATA100 integrated. Given you are using a very fast SD card, throughput will be measurably higher with an ATA133 controller - but almost certainly not noticeably so. The main metric for how fast a system feels is the random read performance, which is totally dependent on the 'drive' (SD card) and does not change with controller bandwidth.

Disadvantage to using a PCI controller is that it comes with its own BIOS that delays boot quite a bit. Tbh, I'd say that delay isn't worth the very minimal added sequential read performance you might get.

Thanks for your reply, that was quite thorough!

Reply 3 of 3, by melbar

Posted on 2019-09-11, 16:41

melbar Offline

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Look at this post:

SD vs Compact (converted from IDE)

Sequential Read:
You will get half of the possible speed of an IDE (UDMA100 / UDMA133) hard drive. The HDD has ~40MB/s to 50MB/s sequential read.

The SD-to-IDE adapter will limit at ~20MB/s.

But it's true that there is better random read for the flash drive.

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