UDMA 66 vs ATA-33

[willrob]

The optical drivs in MAcs are connected to an ATA 33 bus. Pioneer recommends, for best burning speeds, that the 109 be connected to at least an UDMA 66.

Not being familiar with PCs, can I assume that the UDMA 66 is equivalent to the Mac's ATA-66 bus?

I've read on the xcelerateyourmac web site that users who were dissapointed with their burning speeds with 16X drives, connected them to their ATA-66 bus and got better results. I assume the ATA-100 bus would be even faster.

[willrob]

Answering my own question, I looked in oor Glossary:

ATA
Advanced Technology Attachment or called Parallel ATA is a disk drive implementation that integrates the controller on the disk drive itself. There are several versions of ATA:
ATA, also called IDE.
ATA-2, also called EIDE.
Ultra-ATA, also called Ultra-DMA, ATA-33, and DMA-33.
ATA/66 ATA/100
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/A/ATA.html

So it looks like UDMA is same as ATA-33
and UDMA-66 (not listed) must be same as ATA-66. Bottom line the 109 needs to be on the hard drives bus rather than the mac's optical bus.

[terryj]

If you own a G4 MDD tower series, the bus speeds are
ATA-100 ( main boot carriage), ATA-66 ( secondary HD carriage)
and ATA/33 ( Optical Bay).
Apple reccommends for best performance that you
keep the main boot HD on the ATA/100 chain
but I know for a fact you can move it to the ATA/66
chain and not have any problems.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75343
of course, to secure the optical drive onto the ATA/100 bus,
requires buying extra cable as the stock won't quite reach
the optical bay.

[willrob]

Thanks for the info. I have a back-up drive on the second ATA-100 bay, and a RAID of two drives on the ATA-66. If a test of the DVR-109 on the ATA-66 (easiest to disconnect without loosing data) provides faster/reliable burns, I might consider getting a PCI ATA-66 or ATA-100 card to run it on, since I don't think there's any way I'd want to run a HD off the optical bus.

[terryj]

If you get a PCI card, I HIGHLY reccommend the Sonnet Tempo Trio.
It is ATA-133, but it is highly reliable, we use them in
G4 data servers at work hosting twin 250GB WDHDs off
of them, and never have any problems and max
uptime/transfer rate.

[willrob]

I currently have two 200Mb Seagate drives striped as a RAID. I'd move them to the ATA card, once I finish the video project whose files are stored on it. Then i could move the DVD drive to either the Macs ATA-66 bus or to the PCI card.

I'm larning to live with the fact that my $3000 computer doesn't support Core Image. Investing in a new video card ($200) seems less important than the ATA PCI card. Although the Radeon cards allow S-video out to a TV, which is great for previewing NTSC color. Money, money, money....

Terryj, you have the 109, as I recall. And reported getting 16X burn times in the 3-4 minute range with the 1.40 firmware. Do you have the drive on the regular optical bus? Do you have a G5 that has a faster optical bus?