ATA transfer speed

how can i be sure that my ATA is really running on ATA 133. cause my benchmark says that my hard drives performance should be alot better.

It is not that important. Before Western Digital's Raptor came out, the fastest IDE disks were Western Digital Speical Edition disks. They are all ATA100. Maxtor's ATA133 disks were no match due to less cache and higher seek time. WDSE disks have 8MB cache with seek time of 8.9ms, Maxtor ATA133 disks have only 2MB cache with 9ms ~ 10ms seek time.

Raptors are faster mostly due to their seek time is only 5.2ms.

well is there a way? i want it to be as fast as possible, even if its a very little increase.

Edit: if i put them on RAID will it be alot faster? and how can i get RAID to find both of my hard drives cause when i plug it into RAID it only finds one of them.

Raptors are faster mostly due to their seek time is only 5.2ms.

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Raptors currently are only availible in SATA, not IDE. While they are faster, you can only take advantage of them if you have a SATA MB, or a SATA expansion card. Maxtor does produce 8 Meg cache ATA 133 drives. While the seek time is only 9.3ms in comparison to WD's 8.9ms, The ATA 133 of the Maxtor's makes up for it, provided the MB/expansion card supports ATA 133. But, if you're worried about bench marks, the WD's are faster.

CrystalMethod said:

Raptors currently are only availible in SATA, not IDE.

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I know. Just saying the simple fact of seek time alone effect a lot.

PCFreek14 said:

well is there a way? i want it to be as fast as possible, even if its a very little increase.

Edit: if i put them on RAID will it be alot faster? and how can i get RAID to find both of my hard drives cause when i plug it into RAID it only finds one of them.

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You need to two same size hard disk to use the raid. Among all the different raid setup, raid 0 is the one will increase speed. For best performance, you'd better to get two same model disks. Raid will read two disks as one, for example, two 120GB disk will be one 240GB once they are used on raid. If you have two different size of disks, the total size will be only twice of the smaller one, which makes you lose some storage.