Curtis Rey wrote:
I believe Dave Smith is essentially correct about the issues. A person will see a reasonable and noticable increase in HDD response time more with drives that run at 7200rpms, combine this with a ATA/udma 66/100 drive and you will notice a difference. However, if you have a standard or 5400 rpm drive with ata/udma 66/100 then the increase in speed/performance will be minimal. The real increase comes from the seek-time and speed of the drive - 7200 rpms is the real ticket. Also the HDD buffers help because it will load/cache of data that is ready to go when called (e.g 2 or 4 MB HDD buffer/cache is better the 512KB - excuse my mixing of term "buffer" and "cache", can't remember the exact term for this feature - i believe it's a buffer but not sure).
My drive is a 7200RPM Maxtor ATA100 30GB model, so I assume from what you say that I'd realize the benefits of an ATA100 controller. When my system boots up, one of the messages I see is: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx Since the mobo claims 33/66, should I be inserting the override? How would that decision be affected by the presence of an ATA100 PCI controller? Paul