ATA/133 PCI Card

[mustang581]

I just bought a second hard drive and did not know at the time that it also came bundled with a PCI ata/133 card.
My mother board supports ata/100 and I know the drives will adjust to the speed but my question is will I see any significant performance in using the adapter card or will it cause me headaches.
my setup is as follows:
AGP video card
pci sound card
pci network card
pci Pinnacle capture card
2 hard drives (will be replacing one of these)
1 cd-rom
1 sony dvdr

any comments,
thanks.

[Remco]

Defenitely use the ATA133 PCI card.
The difference between ATA100 and ATA133 is noticable with the transfer of large files!!

So I would have the two hard drives on the PCI ATA133 and the cd/dvd on the ATA100

[doom969]

Is it a pci66mhz or pci33mhz card ?
Because if its a pci33mhz (standard) card it is possible that the slow speed of the pci bus will cause a bottleneck effect...
In that case the onboard controller could be faster even if its only ata/100.
_________________
d0oM969

[Jayhawk]

I agree, the best solution is to put the two drives on the ATA133 card. One thing you might want to check is whether you can boot from a drive connected to the ATA133.

I ran into a problem with a Promise controller card a couple of years ago. The drivers loaded with the operating system and the bios didn't recognize the Promise connected drives at boot time. Same issue if you want to boot from a CD drive and it's connected to a PCI card. I wound up putting my new drive on the PCI card (D but kept my operating system drive (C on a bios detectable channel. Same thinking on your CD/DVD ROM drive. Keep at least one on a bios channel.

[mustang581]

thanks everyone, for the replies.
I will probably use the secondary drive on the pci controller card.

[gee69]

Here is my current setup.... 3 SCSI drives (2- 18 GB, 1 - 30 GB) connected to a tekram scsi controller. I have an old 40GB maxtor attached to my master on the primary controller and a DVD-rom as slave. Then I have a Plextor CD-writer on the secondary IDE controller as master. The 40GB houses my OS, programs, and data..the 30 GB scsi is for video only but running out of room...the 2- 18's are for backup and other misc stuff

Now, I am adding a 160 or a 200 GB Maxtor which I think is ATA 133 with a PCI 133 card...

so what is the best set-up...the 160/200GB will be just for video only.

Thank you for any advice

[txpharoah]

Add the card, use up to 8 IDE devices at once (if it fits in the case, use duct tape so my drives all fit). Yep, I'm Texan, I'm redneck, and duct tape DOES fix everything down here. Or chicken-wire, but only if you really need it.

Anyway, boot from the IDE1 onboard, and put the video drives on the card. Faster data for the video, but still standard system that way for booting. Put your CD/DVD drives onboard IDE, wouldn't do it on expansion card, can underrun sometimes if you copy from expansion slot to the onboard. Capture to card HD, I don't drop frames that way, almost as good as RAID I have at work. If you have RAID on the card, use it.

My advice.
Works for me, otherwise, I'd not have suggested it.