EIDE Hard Drive Upgrade

[Angelus]

Hi I am looking to upgrade my hard drive to a 200GB, 7200 RPM EIDE hard drive. The only thing im not really certain of is that right now all i have is the IDE interface and I dont really have any room left on my pci board for the Ultra ATA Controller Card that is required to use the EIDE hard drive...are there any drives with high storage (80GB+) that have 7200 rpm and 8 mb cache? I've looked but couldn't find any. thanks

[Hiro2k]

Any of the Western Digital Special Editions have the 8MB cache and should be 7200 RPM.

[Angelus]

Yeah I've been looking at those but it seems all the drives today are EIDE and use the Ultra ATA 100 interface...I was just wondering if there were any hard drives that use the older IDE interface but with the same specs of the western digital hard drives.

[Mole]

What older IDE interface?

ATA-133 drives will automatically run at the fastest supported speed by the IDE controller.

So for example if your controller only supports ATA33, the HDD will automatically run at that speed.

In other words, you can plug it into your ATA33 port with no problems. It shouldn't have much impact on performance anyway since ATA133 is just maximum bandwidth. Most HDD can only deliver something between 30-40 MB/s max anyway.

The only reason why you would need to an ATA133 controller is:

1. You have used up all 4 available IDE ports on the motherboard and want to add more IDE devices.

2. Your motherboard doesn't support higher ATA speeds and you would like to run the HDD at it's full potentials.

Reason 1 is quite legit reason, but buying a card just for the sake of getting the HDD to run at higher ATA speed is just plain stupid. Most motherboards supports at least ATA66 now and that's plenty of bandwidth for 99% HDDs.

[The Edge]

ATA100 (or ATAPI-6) only supports drives up to 137Gb i'm afraid. So, to have a 200Gb, you will need a PCI ATA133 expansion card.


Edge

[Mole]

Actually, the 137 GB limitation is not about ATA, but that the interface only use 28 bit addressing, while larger than 137 GB requires 48 bit addressing.

For instance, most chipsets from Intel use 48 bit addressing, but may support only ATA-66, such as the 810 chipset.

But still, there shouldn't be any problems if the HDD is smaller than 137 GB

[Ramirez]

Exactly, as long as your systems have a 48-bit LBA compatible BIOS installed + WINXP service pack-1 (which adds 48-bit LBA support) there shouldn't be any problems of supporting larger then 137GB hard drives.