Navigate: Advice Beginners BIOS Guide CPUs Links Mainboards Memory Network Storage Video/Sound Cards Contact Forum SiteMap Sponsors Home PC Hardware from Made-in-China.com Search: Enter your search terms   Web www.lostcircuits.com Submit search form	.
Prices:

Since most current chipsets do not support the UATA 133 mode yet, Maxtor offers their own PCI interface card featuring the latest Promise PDC 20269 controller chip to add the ATA133 interface to any system. Of course, it has been argued that there is no difference between the IDE interface and the PCI-based adapters since the PCI bus, especially in VIA chipset based boards that lack the PCI bus parking is crippled anyway. We'll see about that in just a little while.

Maxtor ATA133 PCI card based on the Promise PDC20269 controller chip.

Where the IBM drive comes as a standalone unit without additional software, Maxtor adds a Max-Blast floppy and Max-Blast installation CD for easier installation and configuration of the drive. The Software is based on EZ-Drive from StorageSoft which has been used by WesternDigital as well. I personally still prefer fdisk, however, with higher drive capacities, fdisk has some severe issues.

Test Configuration

Please note that the capacities of the two drives are vastely different, in that the IBM drive was tested in its 20 GB configuration whereas the Maxtor drive was the top model with 80 GB. For the purpose of this review, these differences don't matter. The ASUS A7V333 was chosen since the board natively supports the UATA133 interface and also to answer the question of how bad the PCI performance of the VIA chipset really is. We'll have pretty conclusive answers.

next page:    => HDTach and the Reality, er, Sanity Check =>