Hotrod 66 anygood?

[Lundberg.nu]

Does anyone here got any idea how good
the Hotrod 66 from Abit works. For those who
dont know what it is. It's a card that enable
Ultra DMA/66 on a motherboard that only supports DMA/33.

This is because I'm have pretty much
decided to buy the IBM Deskstar 27 G. GXP
drive. It uses DMA/66 and I only have
DMA/33 on my motherboard and want to get the
most speed out of the drive.

Or should I get an complete new motherboard?

Lundberg

[Pertti]

The harddrive will give you the same performance on UDMA33 controller as well (as we are talking about Video Capturing/editing/playback).

As the UDMA66 is still quite new technology, I wouldn't go and buy a controller before I would need an other controller anyway, or before it comes built-in on the mobo.
(there are always problems with first revisions)

Pertti

[paulw]

I put in a Hotrod66 in about 3 weeks ago when I bought a new 17G Seagate U66 HD (I can hear Doc saying No! No!) It is the 5300RPM drive but in both Sandra and Matrox drive test it shows 9775K. (nearly 10Meg/sec) Was easy to install and does the job until I upgrade my mother board next year. Well worth the money.

[Pertti]

Just like I said

At the moment the limiting factor is writing/reading from the actual disk, and there are very few drives that can do that at more than 16MB/sec, so UDMA33 is more than enough.

The 33 and 66MB/sec are the interface speeds, at which the data can be moved between the drive cache and main memory, but then we are talking about very small amounts of data, not Megabytes and certainly not hundreds of megabytes.
(don't let the marketing idiots and benchmarking programs to fool you)

In Video editing we are interested in Sustained transfer rates (Uncached transfers)

Pertti

[RBryant]

My roommate has one, and it has given him nothing but trouble... he has tried three different brands of hard drives, and talked to HighPoint (the poeple that make it for Abit) and gotten a couple of engineers to look at his setup.

Apparently it works great as long as you don't try and use NT's software RAID. My roommate tried it normally, and it worked great... but as soon as he tries to setup the three drives into RAID with striping and parity, then it crashes as soon as he tries to copy something onto that volume...