Question regarding ATA/100 performance on an ATA/33 mobo & whether or not to upgrade

Hey all - I'm buying the "15GB EIDE ULTRA ATA/100 LP DESKSTAR 7200RPM 75GXP" from BUY.COM for $108, and I had a few questions about ATA/100 that I didn't really know was out yet. I have a one or two year old Dell with a 5400RPM IBM Deskstar 16.8GB on an ATA/33 controller (running in the primary master slot). I also have a DVD-ROM on the primary slave and a HP CD-RW on the secondary slave. My master plan was move the old IBM 16.8 to the secondary master slot, and put the new 15GB in its place in the primary master slot. Now, my question is, would it be worth it to buy an ATA/100 controller card? What kind of performance gains would I see over the ATA/33 that it would be running at if I did nothing? Thanks in advance. -Ben __________________ I didn't notice any difference on my ultra/66 drive using the ultra/66 controller. It's mainly because you would need a hard drive with a damn fast spindle speed to see any difference. Mine is 7200 rpm. Havent had much experience with ata/100. As far as i know, there would be no difference for the same reason. ------------------ §=-Sp34dFr34k-=§ __________________ Your buying an excellent hard drive Ben_Williams. I should know since I have the 20 gig version of it. Is it worth buying a new controller card? That's up to you to decide. IDE cards like Promise's Ultra66 and Ultra ATA/100 are cheap. Unlike older ata66 hard drives the new ata/100 hard drives like IBM's 75GXP and Maxtor's DiamondMax Plus 6800 hard drives actually do perform over 33MB/sec in burst mode. In my experiences there definitely is a performance difference in comparison to ata/66 hard drives. Most of the performance difference is not due to the ultra ata/66 or ata/100 however. I was looking at that Promise Fasttrak controller card, and it's calling to me, but for the moment I think I'll just stick with the drive and see how that goes... my bank account is already crying at the loss of a good chunk of my balance Quick question though - if I do get that card, is there a way to select the drive attached to it as drive C:? I had always thought that the device connected to the primary master port on the motherboard's IDE controller automatically got that, but I'd much rather the new drive connected to the card (if I go for it) go the C: letter. Oh, and another question too - for the time being, while I don't get the card, what would be the best configuration for my drives? I have my existing 16.8 IBM Deskstar, a Hitachi DVD-ROM and an HP CD-RW. Right now, the hard drive's on the primary master, the DVD's on the secondary master, and the CD-RW is on the secondary slave. My plan was to move the existing hard drive from primary master to primary slave and put the new one on primary master, but is it a good idea to have both hard drives on the primary? Or would it be better to put them both as masters, with the DVD and CD-RW drives as slaves? Yeegads, the slave/master isn't really the most P/C term they could've used for this imho -Ben Mavi forum