Abit Hot Rod 66 ATA-66 controller review
July 3, 1999
By Joel Kleppinger
ATA-66 has been around a while in the hard drive arena. Western Digital has been selling ATA-66 enabled hard drives since sometime around October 98.
However, other than the MVP4 and Apollo Pro chipsets, controllers and motherboards supporting the spec have been few and far between.
Now, in July of 99, Abit is changing all of that by introducing several products that all support ATA-66, the first of which is the Hot Rod 66.
The Hot Rod 66 is a PCI controller that adds 2 more IDE channels, and both support ATA-66. It gives the user the freedom of supporting up to 4 ATA-66 or lower devices, while allowing the motherboard's onboard IDE ports to be manipulated seperately.
This allows there to be up to 4 IDE channels enabled, 2 ATA-66 channels, and 2 onboard channels on the motherboard, totally up to 8 IDE devices. There goes the lack of IDE channels. :)
Auto detects and supports Ultra Mode(ATA/EIDE) transfers
Recognizes drives up to 128 GB (!!)
Advanced Data Features
Support new CRC enhanced data protection for Ultra-ATA drivers
Dual data channels allow seperate device timings for Ultar-ATA and EIDE devices
Software Support
DOS 5.0 and above Windows 95/98 Windows NT 4.0
Summary
Price Street $50 + ATA-66 capable Adds 2 IDE channels - Pricey Drives are just beginning to use the extra bandwidth
Overall The jury is still out on the performance increase of ATA/66 with today's hard drives, but the HotRod66 is great for adding on 4 more IDE ports.
Setup as tested: Celeron 300A @ 450 Mhz 128MB Viking PC100 SDRAM Diamond Viper V550 AGP 9GB Seagate Medalist Pro 7200rpm ATA-33 13GB WD AC31300 ATA-66 Digital Research 50x CD Creative SB Live! Value 19" Viewsonic PS790 Windows 98
So what came with it?
The card was packaged with a good manual, a driver disk, and two ATA-66 dual-drive cables. The manual was pretty good, covering installation thoroughly on Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT 4.0. The cables are 80-conductor, 40-pin cables as required by the ATA-66 spec. Below is a diagram of the cables (courtesy Abit).
Installation proceeded well, except for a few snags. As the manual points out, the blue connector must be plugged into the motherboard, the black one connects to the master drive and the grey connects to the slave. The cable itself reminded me somewhat of an Ultra-Wide SCSI cable with colored IDE connectors.
The installation of the card went fine, and after disabling the primary channel on the motherboard (to save IRQs since it was no longer in use), I booted to Windows. The card was detected properly and the drivers installed. After a successful reboot, I downloaded the enabling software from the Western Digital web site. Then, I rebooted to a floppy to enable ATA-66 on my Western Digital 13GB drive which had been running in ATA-33 mode to this point. Upon booting and running the software, I found that the software did not detect any hard drives installed, even though I had two connected to the Hot Rod 66. I found that I had to reinstall the drive to the original motherboard IDE connector, then re-run the ATA-66 enabling program again. Once I did this, I was able to detect the hard drive and convert it to ATA-66 mode.
From there, I simply rebooted and the drive was detected at ATA-66 and everything worked perfectly.
Performance
First, the test. The 13GB Western Digital drive was set to be a slave to my 9GB Seagate Medalist Pro drive. Both drives had DMA checked for the first test (for the second, the drive properties didn't have the checkbox). It was then partitioned as follows: 1.8 GB FAT32 | 2GB FAT | 6.6GB FAT32 | 1.7GB FAT32
The first partition had 600 MB free space and the third partition had 1GB free space. These are the two partitions where WinBench was tested and Threadmark was run with both of those partitions checked. After every test, the hard drive was defragged and the PC was rebooted. On to the benchmarks...
For the most part, there is improvement in the scores from ATA-33 to ATA-66, but the improvement varies, seemingly randomly. Perhaps there is some order, but it is difficult to discern, especially with the differences in the 3rd Partition. The Threadmark benchmark is a bit more telling.
Here, we see ATA-66's slightly improved transfer rate, but the jump from 22% to 24% in CPU utilitzation is disappointing. It does not appear that ATA-66 has been well-optimized for optimal CPU usage for the increased transfer rates. Either the increased utilization is caused by the driver overhead or by increased CPU involvement for data transfer.
It is very good to see standards being pushed ahead even quite before they are needed. 7200 rpm ATA-66 drives are just beginning to hit the market and it will be a few months before the ATA-66 drives outnumber the ATA-33 drives. It's pretty clear from the benchmarks above that the 5400 rpm drives don't use the extra bandwidth fully, so the benefits of ATA-66 will be the domain of the 7200 rpm and 10,000+ rpm drives.
The Hot Rod 66 itself is a good controller, and with the current prices of ATA-66 cables (about $10-15 a cable), getting two cables with the controller is very nice and makes it worth consideration for the user to upgrade. Still, for most users, holding off until drives that need the extra bandwidth arrive, is probably the correct choice. For those users that need the extra IDE ports, this is a great way to add two channels and get the latest in IDE connectivity all in one upgrade.
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