Hard Drive Ata Speeds...

[geprobert]

I have 2 PC's that I use - one (my g/f's, on broadband) which I use to share files on Kazaa, and the other that is mine, which just has a modem.

My PC had:
- one 40GB Seagate ATA-100 drive, running through a Highpoint RAID controller (capable of ATA-100)

My g/f's had:
one 20GB Maxtor ATA-100 drive, running on standard IDE controller (also capable of ATA-100).

I just bought myself an 80GB Maxtor ATA-133, and put the 40GB into my g/f's PC - more space to share files on Kazaa
Anyway, when I was in the process of swapping drives, I noticed that both of the ATA-100 discs only run at UDMA mode 4 (which I think is ATA-66). But my ATA-133 drive, on my Highpoint controller, does run at UDMA 5 (ATA-100).

Now, if I am correct, UDMA 4 is 66mb/s and UDMA 5 is 100mb/s - so why aren't the ATA-100 drives running at UDMA 5? Both the drives and the controllers are capable of it.

With my ATA-133 drive, when I go to "Test all drive speeds" in Nero (on the Image tab, when looking at CD-copy) it says my drive has a speed of 57mb/s. When I look at the two ATA-100 drives and do the same, they are 21 and 41 mb/s - wtf?!

I have looked at Maxtor's site, and made sure all my configs are right - Windows 2000 device manager has UDMA enabled, etc. I have found that Win2000 is much faster on my new PC with the ATA-133 drive, and I want this other PC to fulfil its potential! If anyone has any ideas or info, I would be most grateful!

[Supernatural]

ATA-100 and ATA-133 are just maximum THEORETICAL transfer rates. Real-world transfer rates are no where near that. That's how technology is. They say it can reach a certain amount of speed, but it never does.

[4play]

I had a problem with getting my 2 hdd to run at ata100. it turned out i needed to get the latest drivers for my motherboards chipset after that it worked a treat.