UDMA 100

[JadedC36]

Are there any ATAPI drives (CD, DVD) that are copatable with an ATA100 HDD? I remember earlier (ATA33) that other devices would slow down the ATA33 device if they were on the same EIDE controller.

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Michael McCann

[iisbob]

They are all "compatible" with the ATA100 standard, but because they are a peripheral component they are only rated to the 33MB's persec data transfer rate. This is a failure on their controller part, not the IDE bus on your motherboard.
I beleieve they are working to change this, ie..Pioneer had a brief mention on the possibility of increasing their CD/DVD burners to a faster data transfer rate.

It's not really a major issue if your drive doesn't run at the ATA100 burst rate specs; most drives transfer data in a sustained rate of around 35-45MB's per sec. Unles you're doing some heavy video editing/music editing that moves gigabytes of information you're not going to really notice much difference in the performance.

The issue really only comes up in real world applications when you place a CD burner on the same controller channel as a Hard drive; sometimes you'll recieve a buffer underrun error-because the CD burner cannot keep up with the Hard drive's data transfer rate.

If you absolutely need to hook up a CD/DVD to the same channel as your Hard drive, go right ahead-it's not recommended but it won't hurt anything, it'll still work.



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iisbob
""I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know."
Mark Twain

[This message has been edited by iisbob (edited 12-08-2001).]