Ultra ATA 100 vs. Ultra ATA 133...is 133 better?

[Werble]

Hi all,

Just wondering what your experiences are with ultra ata 100 vs. ultra ata 133 in terms of faster capturing (fewer dropped frames, faster encoding, etc.). I have maxtor hard drives capable of 133 MB/Sec transfer speeds but are plugged into uata 100 controllers on my motherboard. Will upgrading to a controller card that is capable of 133 MB/Sec increase speed performance of my drives for better captures and rendering times or is it a waste of $$$ that really wont make much of a difference? What are your opinions? Thanks in advance.

[crazyhorse]

ATA 133 is faster but if you are using a controller card that is plugged into a pci slot then it will slow DOWN to pci speed (ATA 33?)

[Werble]

I am not sure I understand. If it gets bumps down to ATA 33 as you say, then why make uata 100 and uata 133 controller cards if either one gets bumped down to ata 33 using maxtor 133 drives? I realize there is a limitation in pci bus speed but does it really get bumped down to ata 33 speeds? Can you (Carzyhorse) or anyone else elaborate on this. Thanks.

[budz]

ATA 133 PCI CONTROLLER CARD will not give you better captures, faster encoding & fewer dropped frames. To my knowledge it has nothing to do with it. If you want better capture use a good capture card or buy a CANOPUS ADVC-100. As for encoding it all depends on how fast your CPU is and what encoder you use. TMPGE PLUS does take longer to encode, CCE and MAIN CONCEPT are faster. Read the guides to the left<<<<<Check out www.lordsmurf.com for information on capture cards (video cards).

Getting a MAXTOR ATA 133 CONTROLLER CARD is only good if you're going to use it to hook your hard drives. Otherwise spend your money on something else.

[sterno]

ATA133 will almost certainly have no effect at all on capturing or encoding. Encoding reads and writes data very slowly. Capturing writes data, which is limited by the physical drive. 100 and 133 are both faster than any drive can read or write, you can only approach those when you read something that's in the drive cache.

If an ATA133 card had to slow down for your PCI bus then your on-board controllers would have the same limitation. On-board IDE controllers are on the PCI bus, they just don't plug in to a slot. They might face a little more resource contention, though.

[lordsmurf]

It can help. This is one of those kinds of questions where you've got to consider a dozen or more things at once. It varies from case to case too.

But from 100 to 133, not much difference.

[Kolosus]

ATA cards do work, and the hows and why's can be found on the net. But you won't see any exceptional performance increase by "just" switching to ata133, or sata150 for that matter. Along with budz suggestions, you might find this article of interest. It's an older article, and not directly related to video, but still has relevance to your original question.

http://tech-report.com/reviews/2003q1/ata-comparo/index.x?pg=1


Regards.

[SatStorm]

Just for the record, I can capture with ATA 33 and no frame drops. But this must be a second drive, connected on the second IDE
With ATA 66 it doesn't matter. Naturally so with ATA 100 / 133 .

[proxyx99]

Regular PCI bus bandwidth is anywhere between 100-130 MB/s. Theoretically 1 drive could take up the whole bus capacity but this is practically improbable. HD's above 66 MB/s are safe for most amateur capture and other video applications. Maxtor ATA 133 is faster with large files but slower with small files (below 500 kB) then WD ATA 100. In real life their performane is quite close. Both are good for video stuff. With regard to upgrade from 100 to 133 I'd say it makes no sense (0 improvement in video department). Data transfer rates between hard drives will be better between two ATA 133 HD's though (30-40% improvement handling very large data chunks).