ATA 66
 

My Motherboard supports ATA 66 transfer, I don't use it at present but am contemplating using it very soon. I have 2 hard drives one is ATA 66 the other is not, it's a 33. At present they are both on the primnary IDE channel as master and slave with the ATA 66 as slave. If I put them on the ATA 66 IDE channel would the 66 drive run/work at that transfer rate or would it drop to the lower 33 drives transfer rate.

Don't know about that but I started using ATA66 transfer rate and can't notice any difference at all. Bear in mind you'll need an 80-way cable too.

Hi Spanners,

I'm using both a ATA66 drive (Master) and a ATA33 (Slave) drive on the Primary Controller. The ATA66 is Master and even with the other drive added, it still runs at ATA66. This seems to work with any ATA33 drive alongside it - the second drive is in a caddy so I can swap drives out between other PCs.

What I've done is to disable the Primary IDE on my Tekram BX chipset dual CPU mainboard, which is a standalone PCI card through the BIOS and use the ATA66 controller. The Secondary IDE on the mainboard is used for my Pioneer 6X DVD (Master) and Ricoh MP7040A CD-RW (Slave).

The controller has a Promise chipset, but is sold as an Asus product. Purchased with my new 13.6G IBM HDD at Christmas from Videocom in Golden Shopping Centre, Sham Shui Po, HK.

You will need a special ATA66 cable though. The one which came with my card only had one drive connector. A new one with two connectors should set you back about HK$30.
Good luck and if you've any problems, email me at: [email protected]

[This message has been edited by techie (edited 09 April 2000).]

Thanks for that, I have all the neccessary gear, just needed to know if it would work before trying it and killing a hard drive.
Thanks again.