Ultra ATA/66 versus Ultra ATA/33 Comparison

Other Devices

If you managed to survive reading through all of those charts, you have probably come to the same conclusion that we have; although definitely needed for future bandwidth capacities, the Ultra ATA/66 interface only offers a slight performance boost to current generation drives, and then only when running certain applications.

Another question that we frequently get asked here at AnandTech is if running a non-Ultra ATA/66 device on the same IDE channel as your Ultra ATA/66 hard drive will affect its performance much. We outlined some situations you might encounter when setting up your system at the beginning of this article, and we will now take a brief look at how much of an impact a non-Ultra ATA/66 device on the same IDE channel as the hard drive will have.

By using the information gained in the Ultra ATA/33 versus Ultra ATA/66 testing, we can already see that if there is a performance hit when running in the above outlined configuration: it will be minimal and would only affect us under certain situations. While this is true for the current generation of drives, as we can see by the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40 unit, hard drives will be utilizing the Ultra ATA/66 bandwidth more fully, in the very near future.

Since the Maxtor unit was the only one that came close to using all of the Ultra ATA/33 specifications bandwidth, we decided for the purposes of this brief test we would only use it to demonstrate the affects a non-Ultra ATA/66 device on the same IDE cable as a Ultra ATA/66 drive has.

The following tests are the exact same as in the above testing, with the exception that a Panasonic CD-ROM drive, operating in PIO Mode 4, was added to the same cable as the Maxtor hard drive. The hard drive was acting as Master and the CD-ROM drive as Slave. The system was configured to run in Ultra ATA/66 mode identically as in the above Ultra ATA/66 tests, including use of an 80-conductor IDE cable. Again, the only difference is the inclusion of the CD-ROM drive on the IDE cable.

Since the results are fairly consistent among all of the operating systems, we have trimmed this next comparison down to just the Windows 98 SE and Windows 2000 NTFS results. We did run the test under all 4 configurations as usual, but felt it redundant to include listings under all of the operating systems, as it is basically the same data being repeated.