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Ed Bott's Microsoft Challenge--9/21/00

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I'm about to upgrade a couple of client machines on my Windows 2000 network, but I'm stuck on the storage category. Should I insist on UDMA-66 or even UDMA-100 drives and controllers? Will they work flawlessly with Windows 2000, or will I have driver and installation headaches? Can I expect a noticeable performance improvement? If you?ve got hands-on experience with this hardware, I'm interested in hearing of your experiences. Please be specific, and be sure to include links to authoritative outside information sources if possible. Good luck!

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by egilden

Promise controllers work good almost flawlessly, they are close to being an industry standard if your going to be using a controller use a promise controller they work flawlessly with win2k no problems so far upgraded 400 hundred computers to win2k with promise 66& 100 cards. Had a couple of problems with a new dell that had udma100 built in win2k wouldn't recognize it but then in the bios I found that the udma setting was off and channels 1&2 were 3rd and 4th in boot sequence so I suspect that that was where all of my problems were coming from other than that dell everything else worked great shouldn't have any problems.

by jeff cichocki

I've done a lot of research on the topic. (speed for a cheap price always gets me going) I found some interesting statistics regarding the two. Unfortuneatly their in my head so I can't give you a reference as to wherE I got them. Anyway, UDMA(?) is a burst speed, not a steady throughput. Manufactures want us to believe that it is though. Is UDMA66 faster than UDMA33? Definitely! Especially if you get a drive that is 7200RPM with at least 2 megs of cache. Because of system limitations,most computers are unable to utilize the UDMA100 to its potential. It is still a little faster that the UDMA66, but not worth the cost of having to buy a separate board to run it. If you are going to buy a top of the line drive, yeas go ahead and get UDMA100 for the drive, just use the built in UDMA66 slot on the board. They are compatible. You will love the boost in speed. Most people do not realize that just spending a little money to buy an 80 strand ribbon cable for UDMA66&100 will improve the overall performance of their UDMA33. 40 strand ribbons are prone to errors at the higher speeds.

Hope this helps

Jeff Cichocki

by tom

I have done precisely the job you are contemplating on more than one occassion. The installation of the controller/motherboard is not a problem although I have had instances where it has been necessary to clear CMOS after installation before completing setup in order for all functions to work properly. There are two things to keep in mind with an upgrade and they both deal with using the "old" components. Obviously you must use special IDE cables to gain any performance increase with the UDMA 66/100, they are identified by the fact that they have twice as many wires in the same sized cable, second is do not use any drives other than UDMA 66/100, if you use an older salvaged drive in combination with a newer drive or by itself you will not see a significant performance gain, the channel used must operate at the speed of the slowest component. I have not had any negative experiences of any magnitude with Win 2K but I would state that I would only use hardware on the HCL for Win 2K when purchasing, while some others may work fine you have no assurances unless you use the HCL and even then you may see incompatibilities as the hardware has been tested to work with Win 2K not necessarily with all the other hardware vendors.

by techytype

Client machines implies secretaries and such. UDMA66 is good for this application. It is unlikely they will benefit from the extra throughput of the UDMA100. You are talking "Upgrade", this implies older machines. If the motherboards already copewith UDMA66 then great. Extremely unlikely the motherboards support UDMA100 so getting an advantage of the faster drive is unlikely. Also very likely is the existing motherboards only support UDMA33.

Combining the two factors, low demand applications and older motherboards I would stick with UDMA66 hard drives.

Of course if performance is an issue because maybe these systems are used by architects or rocket scientists or something then the landscape changes. I have to wonder about the wisdom of using adapter cards to get the capabilities of UDMA versus using a motherboard with this support included. Remembering the KISS principle anything added to a system represents more things that can (and seem to usually happen on Friday afternoon) go wrong. Another consideration, boosting the performance of the hard drive won't make any appreciable difference if the rest of the system is "slow." Upgrades are usually only a viable solution when client is looking to save money (this rules out UDMA100) or have run out of space.

Evaluate the usage of systems before deciding on hardware. Performance needs are dictated by the usage. Demanding applications such as CAD automatically means more, bigger, faster of everything. Word processing can get away with substantially less and the user wouldn't notice the difference in any way that qualifies as legitimate. Loading Word in 3 seconds versus 5 seconds doesn't qualify as an urgent matter. Search and Replace, moving from beginning to end, Block and Move, these operations are more likely to concern the typists and if they are slowed down here then the specifications for RAM are not adequate.

by agschuller

All computers wait at the same speed.

I'd go with the UDMA66. It's been around longer and had been debugged. UDMA100 compatibility will be an issue. Would you put your client's precious data on a technology only months old. I wouldn't, not ifI wanted to maintain a working relationship with them. If you're going to experiment, do it with your machine first, not the clients.

by jolt1

UDMA 66 and UDMA 100 work OK with windows 2000 IF the controller is onboard and/or you dont want any other operating systems and/or dont plan on trying to boot from an adaptec controller as well as dont mind freshly formatting your hard disk before install...
I have had nothing but nightmares with auxillary Ultra 66 controllers (Promise IDE) but have had acceptable results with Promise onboard.. if the rules were met..

by ithink2020

What you want is the new Seagate Ultra SCSI drives. They gaurenty that they will run for 100+ years!!! Thats running time! It is also very fast. Faster than than the udma-100 drives.

Check out seagates website and MAXIMUM PC's Website

by malli

yes go for the promise udma-100 controller pci slot | i am currenlty using udma-66 and great improvement | 7200rpm and 2mb drives 18gigs currently in use if using nt4.0 need an boot up drive with os then you install controller software and it will detect it | if win98 then no problem will detect controller after bios loads then you install controller software

by iglover

I'll will post this from experience only. I have cable modem and did all the tweaks to speed it up. I then switch to a Maxtor 10 Gig
7200 RPM Ultra DMA 66 Hard drive and a Promise Ultra Dma Controller. It was very simple to install on NT 4.0( alsogave me the ability for 8 IDE ports 4 on card and 4 on the motherboard). Everything from the net get cached before being displayed. The result were nothing but astronomical. Did not need a faster computer just a fast controller and hard drive. So itwould depend on your application but with anything it would make a change. Word 2000 now comes up in a blink.

by andrew.hitchcock

Hold off on UDMA-100.

I just bought a few drives for a "personal" server to run at home (thus IDE&!SCSI) they're Fujitsu MPF315423s which are UDMA-66. I'm using an old motherboard with a TX chipset and integrated UDMA-33. So I figured I'd go for a new IDE controller. I got the Promise Ultra100, which was only a few $$ more than the Ultra66 and I'd heard good things about the Ultra66. Installing W2K from scratch (F6 to supply the Ultra100 driver during setup) and everything looked good until the reboot. Windows couldn't find NTkernel32.sys (or something like that) and couldn't continue. I tried different partition sizes, and formats (FAT vs. NTFS) and it didn't make any difference. With FAT I was able to verify that the missing file was,in fact, in the directory where it was supposed to be (which doesn't necessarily mean it was actually where it was supposed to be on the disk ). The only way I could get it to work was to swap the 80-wire IDE cable with an old 40-wire cable. This knocked me down to Ultra-33 but at least I can install and boot W2K.

Since that fiasco, I've been haunting the news groups and Promise's Web site looking for a bios update, since my troubles don't seem to be driver related. On the groups, I've seen numerous reports of problems with the Ultra100, the workarounds are usually to use an Ultra66 if you can find one or us a 40-wire cable until they patch the BIOS.

I'm using version 1.60 of the driver and build 12 of the BIOS

Promise Ultra100 Downloads
http://support.promise.com/Support/All.asp?product=ultra100

by 1pinoytechie

I just built a PIII 633mhz on an Intel 815 chipset with UDMA-66 and I must say the system kicks butt. I had no problems at all. As far as speed goes, I don't believe the UDMA-100 will be much faster. Just stick to something that will be reliable.

by tanderson

I agree use the promise controllers they are the best to do the best job and the drivers are well written as far as speed there is some improvement in performance mostly with high disk access with in increase of about 20% but of cores over all system performance only went up by 3% but for the cost of 39.00 that was a justifiable expense.

by spbrown

You shouldn't have too big a problem with either UDMA-66 or UDMA-100 as both are natively supported by Win2K Pro.

by andreww

Quick answer: prob don't need ata100.
But buy fast drives, and they should run well on 66.

More, and links:
I am using one of IBM's latest HDs, which are very good, very fast, and quiet; under 2000.

This review from August 21, 2000, ranks them the best, and I quite respect this site.
It also explains why we don't really need 100 yet, as well, with a useful graph ata100 subpage.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/00q3/000821/index.html

According to the whitepaper linked to below, no current hard drives need the extra speed offered by ATA100, and won't until later next year. It also has some graphs..

http://www.quantum.com/src/whitepapers/wp_ultraata100.htm

by gala

Dear Ed
Use UDMA-100 Sure you will get performance
improved and you need to install drivers.
Sure thing
Good Luk

by geroxx

Here is an interesting article from a site that tested ATA66 and ATA100 drives. They pretty much found that while the transfer rate of ATA100 is higher, most ATA100 drives out now do not get much better transfer rates than a good 7200rpm ATA66 drive. Here is the Link... http://www.tech-review.com/review.pl?id=184 I am holding off on upgrading to ATA100 until the drives get closer to sustaining 100 MB/s. If speed is an issue and cost is not... SCSI is still the speed king... If only by a hair

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