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The more CPU horse power we get, the more we depend on the I/O performance to get the data where they can actually be put to good use. According tho this doctrine, the HDD performance is becoming the liminting bottleneck in the overall system performance and as we showed some 3 years ago, most benchmarks like the various iterations of Winstone depend more on HDD performance than anything else. This, in turn, means that the IDE interface may be the very crucial spot to look for the differences between mainboards. With this said, we were not disappointed to find some real differences.

MSI K7D-L

A burst transfer rate of 30 MB/sec hardly qualifies for a UDMA 33 interface. We tried three different drives to make sure we were not stuck with a particular anomaly but the numbers remained the same.

ASUS A7M266D

The ASUS A7M266D achieves almost twice the burst transfer rate that we see in the MSI board and also sees a healthy boost in the sustained transfers. The access times are a bit on the high side of the spectrum, though.

Tyan Tiger MPX

Marginally slower in burst transfers but with a solid margin in the access time domain, the Tiger MPX takes home the top score in this contest.

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