Ultra ATA/66 Technology Review

• AMD K6-3 400
• Prototype MVP4 board w/ 1MB L2 Cache
• 128MB PC100 SDRAM
• Western Digital Caviar AC313000 13GB Ultra ATA/66 Hard Drive
• Ultra ATAS 80-conductor cable from www.ultracable.com
• Integrated Trident Blaze 3D (8MB - MVP4 benchmarks)

All Winstone tests were run at 1024 x 768 x 16 bit color

The purpose of Ultra ATA/66 is not for a performance increase to bridge the gap between IDE and SCSI, rather it is to make room for more advancements in the storage industry, there is no point in having a slow bus being the limitation for today's hard disks. The benefits of Ultra ATA/66 will not be seen now, so don't expect to get a huge performance increase over older Ultra ATA/33 drives; however the benefits will surely come around as spin rates get faster and drives grow more efficient, wonder how long it will take before we see 10,000 RPM Ultra ATA/66 drives hit the market…