Ultra DMA-66: Speed to Burn?
All of the major hard drive manufacturers are pushing superfast models built on the new Ultra DMA-66 specification. The spec alone is impressive, doubling the older UDMA’s 33MB-per-second maximum data-burst transfer rates. But if you put in one of these new drives, odds are your old controller card or onboard EIDE connector won’t be able to handle UDMA-66 and will revert to UDMA-33 or even lower. To try to match your new drive’s capabilities, and you’ll need yet another piece of hardware–a UDMA-66 card. After you’ve added the new card, will you then see a big performance gain with UDMA-66? We set out to answer this question by testing Promise’s $59 Ultra66 UDMA-66 controller. Promise vows its new card will boost your drive’s performance, and the company keeps its word. But the increased throughput actually has little to do with UDMA-66. Indeed, there was little to no difference between the card’s UDMA-66 and UDMA-33 performances in my informal tests. The Ultra66 did, however, offer si
