Thinkpads Forum

The hard drive controller in my PC300GL runs at ATA-66. There are any number of inexpensive ATA-100 controller cards available. Any opinions on whether an upgrade like this would make any noticable speed difference? My hard drive is a Western Digital 7200RPM, ATA-100, 8-MB cache, 80GB. I use this machine only for office-type stuff.

FWIW, I read somewhere that the VIA chipsets don't work that well with external hard drive controllers... ?? the details escape me... ??

Since you can pick up a controller card for about 10~20 bucks, It may be worthwhile to drop the cash on it for that price. If nothing else, you could add another 80GB hard disk and RAID0 them together.

For general office type apps though, I think the performance gain would not be too noticeable though.

In my experience, the big difference doesn't come from ATA66 vs ATA100. The difference comes in hard drives. If that is the original ATA66 HDD that came with your PC300GL, a new hard drive would show an increase in performance, but not because it is ATA100.

Newer drives will not only spin faster, but they will have a lot more cache, which helps performance greatly.

If the 80GB you have already is a newer drive, you will not see that much performance enhancement going to an ATA100 controller.

Increase your memory or upgrade the CPU for more performance.

Thanks for your reply.

Yes, my 80GB is a recent model (7200 RPM, 8MB cache). And I've already maxed out my memory (1GB) and processor (1.4GHz PIII-S)...

It really runs quite well, just curious about any possible performance upgrades. Since the HDD light doesn't come on very often (with 1GB RAM), I think I'm going to "pass" on the controller upgrade... it doesn't seem like it would make much difference.

The media data rates for 7200 rpm desktop drives are in the 50-60 MB/s range. So the only thing ATA-100 can help with is emptying the on-disk cache a little bit faster -- once the cache is empty, either type of controller can more than keep up.

I have a all in one netvista where I upgraded the processor from 800 mhz to 1ghz and I had the same question too.

I got sort of the same similar responses.

The only thing I would recommend is to run a system test at pcpitstop.com. When I did that my system told me that my drives were running at an unbuffered speed of 4mb/sec when the "norm" was 20mb/sec.

All things being equal, I thought that it may have been the ata cable which may have been rated for an ata66 capacity. I updated the cable to a ata100 spec but no change.

Finally I somehow stumbled onto a website that recommended that I update the ata driver. So I went to the motherboard's website and downloaded the driver instead of the ibm website.

After that doing the test, my drive ran at the 20mb/sec unbuffered capacity. The drive is still slow at times, when I'm running a dvd complier program and it's number crunching, I can hear the drive spinning madly when I login from the startup screen and go into my account, but the biggest difference I noticed was the my dvd burner went from a 1x burning drive to a 2x burning drive and it now reads up to 5x instead of the 1X. It may not be that fast, but it's a new fast to me and that's all that matters.