RSSMaxtor Introduces Ultra ATA/133
By David Worthington | Published July 31, 2001, 11:30 PM
Maxtor has announced a new iteration of its highly successful Ultra ATA 100 technology. With transfer speeds of up to 133 MB/s, the Ultra ATA/133 interface, or "Fast Drives," promises to deliver breakneck speed at an affordable price. The Fast Drive interface is designed to provide seamless storage and playback of digital audio and video. Several partners have already signed on to license the technology and begin shipping products later this year.
According to the press release, Ultra ATA/100 technology already makes up 90 percent of all hard drives, CD-ROMs and DVDs. The new specification is available under non-disclosure agreements to selected hardware manufacturers. The company has plans to submit an open standard to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) T13 group during the final quarter of this year. Ultra ATA/133 is fully backward compatible with existing ATA products.
Chip maker VIA Technologies, Silicon Integrated Systems Corp, Promise Technologies, and Silicon Image have satisfied license agreements, and are currently preparing to adopt the technology for widespread production in upcoming chipsets. For more information, visit maxtor.com.
These hard drives are absolute garbage. Maxtor has always and will always be 2nd rate junk. They can't even get their hard drives to interface correctly with Award BIOS-motherboards (you have to use a UTLITY to get the bios to see the drive if its above 30 gig!). Even worse, the failure rate of Maxtor HDs are about DOUBLE that of IBM and actually make Western Digital drives look like Hondas.
Sure, the drives are faily fast when they work, but they're about as robust as a twig house. Strictly for computer nerds on a budget who are desperate to eek out every last bit of performance from their tired desktop computers.
IBM is the way to go, even if they don't have this ATA/133 technology (yet).
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|Agreed... Maxtor HDDs are no better than garbage. In fact I was shocked when I got to know that Maxtor's taking over Quantum's HDD business and Quantum is getting out of HDD business. Quantum and IBM are my favorite brands when it comes to HDDs. I'm using an IBM and it's simply superb. However, due to budget constrains, I bought a Quantum LCT 2 yesterday... I can almost be sure that the drive was manufactured using "Quamtum's technology" and most probably before the take over by maxtor... as quantum's URL was printed on the drive... moreover, in m'sia, support for quantum's HDDs are still provided by Quantum's factory, "under" Maxtor's name...:)
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|Actually to let you know, Quantum's HDD drive manufacturing is now done in Singapore in Maxtor's factories. Quantum did not get out of the hard drive business, they straight loss to Maxtor due to the fact that Maxtor DOES have great hard drives. I'll have to admit that I think IBM's are the best, but Maxtor HDD are still some of the best around. I'm doing the qual tests for "Quantums last drive", aka Viper, and the firmware is not NEARLY as good as Maxtor's. So to sit there and say that Maxtor's HDD are garbage, IS GARBAGE! I really have not had trouble with any bios problems in the labs. The only problem with any bios that I have seen is the fact that the new 160 GB hard drives and the bios in the labs cannot see over 136 GB. Oh yeah...and I have about 2500 systems here with everyone bios known to man. But that is an issue with the bios makers.
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|MORONIC Tripe - Fact is Maxtor Drives are reliable. Some drives are faster sure - and more expensive. I sell nothing but Maxtors due to that fact. They virtually never fail - I think I had ONE bad one right from the box & the 3 yr warranty makes it perfect. No questions asked. Seagate (Conner) is GARBAGE - & that's a fact.
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|I can agree with that. My friend has had 3 Maxtor drives crash on him sending his data in to the great unknown (same place my socks go I'm sure!)The really sad part is that he KEEPS buying them ... cause their cheap he says... good grief.
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|It is a fact that Maxtor hdds nowadays are better than before, but judging from wut I saw their hdds did in the past, i dun trust maxtor hdds anymore... as i mentioned earlier, i bought my new quantum due to budget constrain and becoz support is still there... and i believe that the drive was manufactured using quantum's technology, probably prior to the merger with maxtor. Just think about it... news on the merger is widespread, and on maxtor's site, the drive has been renamed to "Maxtor FB lct20"... if the drive was made with "maxtor's technology" instead, why wont they print the name "Maxtor" instead of "Quantum" on the drive? (mine's printed with the name "Quantum")....
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|The only reason why Maxtor is putting out an Ultra 133 spec is because we will be the first to put out a 133 drive this coming month. The drive will be 48 bit with udma 133 support. No one else has that yet. It is pure marketing and serial will eventually be the way to go. I am responsible for the testing of the card here at Maxtor and it is a good card.
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|This is really dumb of Maxtor. It sounds like their ATA-133 is not an "official" standard like ATA-66 or ATA-100 is. Besides, there is no point to ATA-133 since I thought later this year Serial ATA was coming out which will blow the old ATA out of the water. From what I read on Anandtech last year ATA-100 was supposed to be the last old ATA standard then Serial ATA would replace it. No one needs ATA-133 anyway.
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|The reason we're seeing UDMA/133 is that SerialATA is effectively delayed. The tech is still coming along nicely, and we'll start to see drives and adaptors this year, but Intel has pushed back Southbridge integration of SerialATA by almost a year.
Unfortunately. :-(
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|actually the release of ata-133 is a given. a logical next step from ata-100. but ata-133 is the technically limit. so serial-ata will definately be next.
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|IBM is coming out with a new hard drive next year, I think, that will start off with 400GB and be about the same speed of SCSI for about the same price as a 80Gb hard drive. The bad thing is it wont be ATA format....
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|Wow, do you have any links to a whitepaper or something? I was planning to bite the bullet and buy scsi, but if this new drive is all you say it is I will probably hold out for it.
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|Yeah, the press relese is http://www.ibm.com/news/2001/05/21.phtml
and more info on it is at http://www.research.ibm....010518_pixie_dust.shtml
Also their saying it will be out by 2003. Everyone should take a look at these sites. It has alot of information.....
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|As far as I can tell those articles only talk about increasing the capacity of hard-drives. Where did you get the information about them being as fast as scsi?
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|For serial ATA
Check out http://www.serialata.org/
and http://www.maximumpc.com/content/2000/11/22/12270
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|http://www.seagate.com/c...icle/0,1247,992,00.html
Seagate is claming that "Serial ATA will supply storage interface headroom for many generations to come, beginning with 1.5 Gbps, and scalable to 2x, 4x and beyond."
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|Seems like some people need hardware lessons here.
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|Your not wrong about that. Here's a simple guide... note I'm not up with PCI technology but I believe it is 32bit.
Hard drive speeds are measured at bits per second. For example, your hard drive interface reads at 100Mbit/sec. This is equivilent to 100/8 mbyte/sec which is around 12.5MByte/sec. With IDE technology, that is the speed of all drives put togeather sending and receiving data. Most 7000rpm drives can continuously read/write data faster than 12mbyte/sec. Of course, the actually read rate of a drive depends on the drive model. To give you some idea, a 60x CD-ROM drive can read at 9Mbyte/sec.
The PCI bus runs at 133Mhz. This means that every second, 133 million cycles occurs. That's 133 transfers per second. Since we can transfer 32bits of data, we can transfer 4bytes each cycle. The PCI bus is capable of transfering over 500Mbytes of data per second. PCI is capable of transferring huge amounts of data.... Much more than your little old hard drive will ever be able to read.
Hope that clears a few things up for you guys. If I'm wrong about the path width for PCI.. let me know. It may be 64bit... I know in some specs it is. Note that most people only run at ATA 66. You need to have special IDE cables to use ATA 100.
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|Just a correction here. The standard implimentation of PCI only runs at 33Mhz which gives a transfer rate of 132Mbyte per second. PCI 2.1 runs at 66Mhz and gives a transfer rate of 264Mbyte per second. Info came from here: http://www.techfest.com/hardware/bus/pci.htm
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|some more information ... which i believe i am 99% accurate when i say this... the pci bus is 32 BIT and works at 33mhz (normally, not overclocked or anything) at 33mhz & 32bit wide, it hits a maximual transfer rate of 133megaBYTES per second... thats TOTAL for ALL PCI slots... now, ATA/100 transfers a max of 100 megaBYTES per second... ATA/133 transfers 133 megaBYTES per second... which means anything above ATA/133 will be limited by the PCI to 133 megaBytes per second... but here is the catch.. even with ATA/133, you need to share the PCI bus with all your other cards... so for you to hit the top speed, or even CLOSE to the top speed, is out of the question...... whats all this mean ?? that ATA/100 is MORE than enough for current and future drives... because Number 1, there is no single harddrive that can transfer even closely to 100megabytes per second... besides that, if you have more than 1 harddrive, you still wont exceed 100 megabytes per second, because IDE interface wont allow more than one device per channel to communicate at the same time.. so you normally have 2 channels, 2 master harddrives (1 plugged in per channel)... and say these drives can sustain speeds of 40megs/sec... x2 .. thats 80megabyts per second... 20megs lower than ATA/100. now even if faster drives too come out... and your using ATA/133.... you must take into consideration the bandiwidth that will be used by all your other PCI devices... for example your video card (if its PCI only) .. your sound card, your network card, your modem... etc etc... probably if i am correct the network card will be the only one requiring a decent amount of bandiwdth... thats taking into consideration your video card is AGP...
just wanted to clear some stuff up... if i have made a mistake in my numbers please, correct me :-) but i am pretty sure of this stuff.
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|ooh and almost forgot... as orginal eagle said... there is a 64bit version of the PCI bus, which maxes out at 266 megabytes per second... much better, but still pretty limiting considering the fact that not too many cards exist for the 64bit PCI bus, and not too many motherboard manufactures include 64bit PCI buses. usually youll find this in server motherboard, or 'high-end' motherboard... and unless its a server motherboard... the consumer versions or as i said 'high-end' m/b .. only have 1 64bit pci slot. also note that the ATA/100 or ATA/133 is built onto the motherboard so that makes it 32bit. unless of course you pick up a 64bit pci ide controller, and plug it in the 64bit slot... do they even make 64bit ide controllers?? (not sure, actually). i know they have scsi cards that are 64bit PCI. i am actually using the adaptec 29160, which is 64bit pci. but still plugs into a standard 32bit pci.. (you loose the extra speed, so my 160meg/sec adaptec card won't ever reach 160mb/sec cause of the 32bit pci slot... BUT it will hit 160megs/sec when communicating amoungst other SCSI devices, since the data does not have to hit the pci bus...just the scsi card and processor...
(btw, i am talking generally here, there is no 160meg/sec hd that i know of yet :-) )
ANYWAYS :-) , bottom line... SCSI is the way to go, if you got the extra cash... there is a lot more to SCSI then just mere megabytes/sec transfer speed... so even if IDE comes out with a 200megabytes/sec interface, SCSI will probably still have the upper hand cause of its abilitiy to communicate amoung its devices more efficently...
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|actually your wrong, you need special cables (the one with the blue connector) for ATA66, ATA100, and ATA133 (most likely they will be using the same special cable). only the ATA33 works with the normal cable. Plus, 7200rpm drives (i think you meant 7200rpm instead of 7000rpm) transfer WAY over 12megs/sec.. IBM's bad boys can hit over 35megabytes/sec sustainted rates. (75 GXP, i believe is the model name). you got your bits and bytes a little mixed up :-) can be confusing cause most people and documents don't bother to distinquish or don't make it CLEAR if its MB/sec or Mbits/sec...
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|As the subject says, the fastest IDE drives on the market today only make roughly 40 mb/sec. Unlike with SCSI, you can only read/write from one drive at a time, so having a 133 controller does not make sense at all. By the way, the PCI bus is only 133 total...
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|> Unlike with SCSI, you can only read/write from one drive at a time
I don't see that serial ATA deals with this issue. SCSI's still the way to go if you're serious.
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|Change "serious" to "running a server" and I'd agree with you.
Quite a lot of serious computing does not involve simultaneous access of multiple drives. ;-)
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|So I guess the next plateau will be Ultra/200 or Ultra/266 so it will run at the same speed as the CPU? (clock speed that is)
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|no there will not be another speed increase ON parallel cables
http://www.maxtor.com/Ma...s/fastdrive/default.htm
the ata133 matches the pci bus EXACTLY
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|>no there will not be another speed increase ON parallel cables
Yes, Maxtor and Seagate promised last year that ATA 100 would be the last iteration of drives using parallel ATA technology. Serial ATA is supposed to be where the technology is heading.
http://www.serialata.org
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|>no there will not be another speed increase ON parallel cables
Yes, Maxtor and Seagate promised last year that ATA 100 would be the last iteration of drives using parallel ATA technology. Serial ATA is supposed to be where the technology is heading.
http://www.serialata.org
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|Doesn't this just mean that we have a bigger pipe to put things through, yet we still can only utilize a small portion of it?
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|it means that faster drives can be made. If somebody can make a drive w/ a real life transfer speed of 100+MB/s, then you'll see an improvement :-)
Maybe for big RAID setups there will be a difference too.
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|Wow, this kicks ass. :-) So are they predicting an upper ceiling yet, or might we soon see ATA/1000 or something. This is a serious question, anyone know what the word is?
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|The work is $$$$$$$
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|to early in the morning......
i should have said "word"
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