Your older maboard, w/o fiddlin, will simply run ATA 66/100 drives at ATA33. My other cent: upgrading maboard or HD, just for faster ATA, is not worth the time...forget the money. While it's fashionable to specify 7200 rpm (or higher), it simply makes the HD/system run hotter more than it adds any perceivale speed advantage. It's mostly hype.

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#1= Ultra 100 hard drives cost very little. #2= Ultra 100 hard drives have a faster burst rate than 33/66. #3= The IDE controller and the 80 wire cables will allow the highest rate of transfer possible on a given MoBo. #4= Most boards being sold today have onboard Ultra 100 standard. You might as well get the UDMA100 drive since over time you will see less and less 33 or 66es. I have 4 IBM GXP 75 hard drives in my system and short of buying expensive SCSI drives my data moves as fast as it gets. Applications will load quicker and the overall feel of the machine is faster than running 33 or 66. Simply put faster drives are faster. The spindle speed is a point of contention mine are 7200rpm yet the long term arguement is that different tests done by different people show that on the one hand the 7200 is faster and on the other hand the 5400 is faster?? The best improvement anyone can make on a system is for better hard drives. Mine have a 3 year warrenty and IBM has allways made good when I have had drive trouble in the past!! SCSI 160 would be the way to go but that could add thousands of dollars to my system to get the same capacity that I have now. That wold be a plunge that would not make sence for me! (I wish though) All IDE drives are backward compatable with 66 or 33 so you will have no worries there. I recomend using a Promise Ultra 100 controller since that interface seems to preform faster than the controller chips on board. Also stay away from the High Point Controller chip if you intend to run IBM drives,they have compatability issues due to the fact that High Point uses a non standard transfer method. For instance an Abit BE6-II and IBM GXP 75s don't work properly and you will end up really really pissed. I went with ASUS since they do seem to build better boards in general. More to the point IBM has suggested ASUS to me since I had that very problem 7 months ago. The difference between my present system and my older system (still running) is that this one is really fast!! One benifit has been removing Win-ME from the loop and this machine has been as solid as diamonds!! Hope that that helped?? Over and out!!

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Thanks for your info $$%%%@*( I just bought a Quantum Fireball Plus ATA100 7200rpm drive today to replace my ATA66 drive.

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i have an asus a7v ata100 motherboard, and a WD ata100 HDD. i am running win ME and for some reason when i put my HDD in the ata100 IDE socket my system locks after a few min running???? anyone have any ideas? i have tried using win2000, and it has the same prob??? i am confused now. do i need to change a setting? any help would be great! thanks -matt

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matticus, go into cmos setup bios features setup set the boot sequence to floppy, ultra100.. or ultra100, floppy.. make sure pnp os is enabled in pnp/pci configuration "yes" save and exit setup "y" reboot to safemode go to device manager and remove all drives and drive controllers ok ok reboot make sure that only hard drives are on the ultra100 channels and that your boot drive is on the primary channel and the jumpers are set correctly on the hdd (wd is picky about the master only and master with slave jumpers). boot back into windows. shrug and pray should setup your drives and install drivers. go to device manager again check the "view devices by connection" radio button. then double click "computer". make sure the irq button is checked. your ultra100 controler should only share an irq with "irq holder for pci stering" probably irq 11. check your mobo manual for bios/cmos settings. the manual can be downloaded from here: http://www.asus.com/products/Motherboard/socketa/a7v/spec.html if you dont have a hard copy. also you might need the drivers for the promise controllers, but most likely the winME pnp will take care of that.

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