Hard Drive Question

[pacmania_2001]

I have a Gigabyte 6ZXC with a chipset for the first kind of celerons. In the manual it says that is supports DMA 33. I am thinking about getting a new 20 gig hard drive however i want to buy an IBM which is ATA 100. Will this work?

[ebaldino]

Hi.

Not sure I understood your question. If you´re asking "can ata33 and ata100 live together in the same celeron box?" then the answer is yes. Your motherboard very likely only has support for ata33, which means you´ll have to get an ata100 controller along with your new HD. Some ata100 controllers (like Promise´s) even say they´ll speed up your built in ata33....

But if you´re shopping for a new hard drive, get something bigger... the cost/benefit is good enough even for 80gig HDs...

rgds
EBaldino

[RoopeT]

You can buy an ATA 100 drive and it will work on your computer without any controller card in DMA 33 mode. However, you should check from Gigabyte what's the biggest hard disk your BIOS supports. Probably a 30 gig disk is supported without a BIOS update, while 40 gig or more requires an update (if available)

[pacmania_2001]

Sorry i wasnt clear. I want to replace my current hard drive which is ATA 33(not sure) 8 gig with a new 20 or 30 or 40(not sure) GIG hard drive that is an ATA 100. Does this mean i need a controller? Also when i go to install it is there anything special that needs to be done that is different from a normal hard drive installation(apart from installing the controller if needed). Thanks for your help

[grouch]

To answer your question without being tooo specific, Yes you can use an ATA100 hard drive with an ATA33 controller. But here is the catch. It won't work to it's max potential without an ATA100 controller card. The hard drive will only work at ATA33 speeds when hooked up to the ATA33 controller.
Also for the BIOS question, I believe that the Gigabyte 6ZXC is capable of going higher than 40Gig. If not then there is definatelly a Bios flash avalilable for it. Just get the exact bios number you have and do a Google search for the update to that version and flash it. Hope this helps your buying decissions. Good Luck.

[pacmania_2001]

So if i get an ATA-100 hard drive controller will the hard drive that i buy run at ATA 100 speeds or what speed. Thanks again

[d4n13l]

Yes.
Only if you use EIDE cabling that is capable of doing ATA100 though, lol. You will probably get a cable with the HD or controller card though... hopefully... but if you dont, at least you know which cable to buy.

Ooooo, which OS are you running? I *think* that Win2000 had problems with ATA100. Mind you, I *think* the problem was only relevant to motherboards with ATA100 controllers - NOT seperate PCI ATA controller cards. I think Win2000 treats ATA controller cards as SCSI devices or something.

BTW, if you are going to buy an ATA controller card why not get an EIDE RAID capable device and buy 2 identical HD's, each 1/2 of the size of the HD you are thinking of buying (2 x 20GB or even 2 x 30GB drives... or even 2 x 40GB???). Then run a striped array, much better performance for the money, especially if you do a lot of HD thrashing.

[tinmancp]

If you are planning to get a controller card and having the boot partition on the new drive, then yes, the installation would be different. On most MB, the bios sees the controller card as a SCSI device. So if you plan to boot from it, you have to go into the bios and set the booting order to include SCSI.

I would suggest you keep your existing drive as the boot drive, that way you don't have to mess with the bios setup.

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On 2001-11-12 05:20:28, pacmania_2001 wrote:
Sorry i wasnt clear. I want to replace my current hard drive which is ATA 33(not sure) 8 gig with a new 20 or 30 or 40(not sure) GIG hard drive that is an ATA 100. Does this mean i need a controller? Also when i go to install it is there anything special that needs to be done that is different from a normal hard drive installation(apart from installing the controller if needed). Thanks for your help
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