At 11:35 PM 05/17/2000 , Harvey Rose wrote:
>I am thinking of purchasing a new harddrive and going ATA66. I currently
>have a 10Gig drive ATA33 - with UDMA on. Can I mix these two drives? My
>EIDE are already full LS120, 10Gig drive, CDROM & CD-RW. I will purchase a
>ATA66 card. I've heard that most will handle up to 8 devices. Does this
>mean I could hook up only a ATA66 devices to the ATA66 cable? 10Gig is a
>quite a bit of storage to loose. Would it be better to go strictly to 30Gig
>drive or buy a 20 Gig and use the 10Gig ?
>Also I've heard that a 7200 rpm drive produces more heat then the 5400 rpm
>drive. Is there much differences in heat that it would require and extra fan?
UDMA4 or UDMA66 specification is backwardly compatible. That means
that you can connect your new ATA66 drive with a ATA33 drive to the
same ribbon cable, even your CD Rom drives. Typically, CD Rom drives
are not even UDMA33, but the slower PIO mode 4 or slower.
The BIOS' we use today have overcome the 'old' issue of data constricting
to move at the rate of the slowest drive on a ribbon cable. This is the
same with the add-on UDMA66 controller cards... their onboard Bios
handle this issue also.
(I have a discussion of this in the "Troubleshooting Basics" column
on our web site, beginning with edition #9... running through at least
five editions): http://nospin.com/pc/ts001.html
You will need a special cable to move data at UDMA66, but you can
connect a slower drive on the same cable. Now, this is the standard
and as always their are drives and do not comply, causing problems.
But, this is the exception and not the rule.
As far as heat... as long as the drive has some room for air to move
around it, you will not have a heat issue with a 7200rpm drive. We
regularly mount very large Seagate Cheetah 10,000rpm SCSI drives
eight to a case, (rackmount drive server cases), with no special cooling
on the drive. The drives have room for air movement around them
and fans pulling air through the cases to cool them. These Seagate
drives create a great deal of heat, probably the hottest drive sold
today... and we have no problem. Just be sure the drive has air
movement over it.
I mounted one of these Cheetah drives in my personal client machine,
in a 5.25" bay. The face plate for these large bays did not allow
air to be drawn into the PC and across the drive. I took the face
plate, drilled 12 small symmetrical holes in the face plate for the
bay. Then the powersupply fan draws air from the front of the
case, through the holes and across the drive. It is better to have
air movement across the drive than attaching a heatsink to the drive.
Bob Wright
The NOSPIN Group
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