iXBT Labs heeft een flinke lap tekst online gezet over ATA-100. Ze komen tot de niet zo verassende conclusie dat ATA-100 in net een stukje sneller is dan ATA-66, en dat ATA-66 weer net een stukje sneller is dan ATA-33 (was dit een open deur, of een open deur?). ATA-100 mag dan het snelste zijn maar de verschillen met ATA-66 zijn erg minimaal en rechvaardigen dan ook geen upgrade van ATA-66 naar ATA-100, zelfs een upgrade van ATA-33 naar ATA-100 is volgens iXBT Labs overbodig:
These results once again prove our point expressed above. Testing hard disk drives is a nice and illustrative thing, of course. However, we also wanted to take a look at the influence of ATA/100 interface on the overall system performance and hence tested our systems with Content Creation Winstone2000. the results turned out practically the same for all interfaces. The largest difference mad only 0.1 point that's why we made up our mind not to overload our article with a row of columns of the same size.
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[...] Well, as you see, there is no cause for concern even if you have ATA/33 interface and if you don't work with huge audio and video files. As for ATA/66, it is enough for your today's needs as well. And as far as ATA/100 is concerned, of course it provides a certain performance gain compared to ATA/66. However, the today's hard drives are too slow to make this gain a significant argument in favor of ATA/100 interface. But certainly every innovation is always aimed at the future rather than at the present. Everything keeps developing and very soon hard disk drives may appear much faster rotating at 10,000rpm, for instance, or even more. This is exactly when the new interface will manage to show off.
Besides, we have to admit that the IDE controller in i815E proved more efficient than that by VIA. Maybe it is the drivers, which are the reason of this success, and maybe it's simply the hardware quality. Anyway, let's wait for the promised ATA/100 support in VIA South Bridge. And then we'll see, who is the best…