It seems the hard drive companies are releasing faster and larger drives every week. IBM just announced a 75 GB ATA66 drive, a short time after Maxtor released their 40 GB drive. What could you possibly store on these behemoths? That's the real issue; do we need this kind of storage? I just converted my entire CD collection to WMA 160 kbps format for playing on my home network; the average song is 5 MB, with 12 songs per CD is 60 MB. I have 200 CD's, so my collection is about 12 GB. That's how you fill those drives. And now every game wants at least 100 MB for installation, with quite a few demanding over 500 MB.
So how do we get these new drives working? You buy one and plug it in, right? Let's look at a few factors; motherboard connection, add in cards, cabling and drivers.
Your motherboard is the first stop in giving grief. The motherboard is the board in your computer that everything connects to, like the processor, RAM, video. Depending on how old it is, you may be limited to drives 2.1 GB or smaller, 8.4 GB or smaller, with lots of other combinations. It has to do with limitations in chip set designs, the way motherboards handle communicating with the drive. You may be able to download a new BIOS ( basic input output system, the controls of the motherboard ) and upgrade your existing system to get things going. Or you can use software from Ontrack or others that fool your system into thinking the drive is smaller than it is. The BIOS upgrade is the best way to go, if available. Another option is an add in card that allows you to connect up to four more hard drives; I'll look at this last.
So your motherboard is fairly new and supports large drives. Next problem is the ATA66 connection. Hard drives have evolved from a basic IDE ( integrated drive electronics ) to enhanced IDE, or EIDE. Then we say ATA33 and now ATA66. What's the difference? Drive size and transfer rate have evolved: EIDE has a 16 MB /s speed, ATA33 was 33 MB/s and ATA66 is 66MB/s. These are maximum burst speeds and do not any way represent normal operation. Unless you just, and I mean just bought your motherboard odds are your fastest connection is ATA33. Ways around this? An add in card. Just to play devil's advocate, tests have shown there's not much increase in speed with a ATA66 hard drive and an ATA33 or ATA66 connection, but that's for now and who knows what's what in six months. Confused yet?
The ATA66 calls for one more item: a new 80 wire cable. All IDE cables have a 40 pin connection to go between the hard drive and the motherboard. New cables available have the same 40 pin connections, but now double the wires used to 80 to improve performance.
Drivers are the last hurdle to overcome. While the built in drivers with Windows 9x and NT will work with ATA33 and ATA66 drivers, you're best to update your system with drivers that will take full advantage of these specs. Intel offers Ultra ATA drivers at http://support.intel.com/support/chipsets/driver.htm sorted by chipset, which should be installed to improve performance.
Let's look at what we need to get an new ATA66 hard drive working properly: motherboard support of the drive, an ATA66 connection, proper drivers and an 80 wire cable. What if you don't have this? Your best option is an add in card.
The best and easiest to use add in ATA66 card is the Promise Ultra66 PCI adapter. It's a small PCI card that has two connectors that support two drives each, for a total of 4 drives. To get your system to boot from the card, go into your BIOS and look for start options and select SCSI, A,C or some combination where SCSI comes first. I've discussed SCSI in previous articles, but for now it's a different type of drive that requires an add in card to work, so Promise made their card work the same way. As well, Windows recognizes the card as a SCSI adapter, so the included drivers will work great and not interfere with your Ultra ATA drivers newly installed from Intel. The card sets itself up once you plug in the drives, and works flawlessly. The Ultra66 features a flash BIOS to allow for updates. Another nice feature: the card uses only one IRQ, while your motherboard uses two IRQ's to do the same job. It's simple and effective. Go to http://www.promise.com/Products/idecards/u66.htm and see for yourself.
by Scott VanderPloeg
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