Review: Ultra-ATA/133

Compatibility

While developing specifications for Ultra-ATA/133 Maxtor has taken into consideration full downward compatibility to older ATA standards. The operation of IDE drives only mastering PIO-Mode 0 therefore also is possible with the Ultra-ATA/133 interface. For example, in our test a seven year old Quantum ProDrive LPS with 52 MBytes capacity worked with an Ultra-ATA/133 controller without any difficulty. And there is no problem using Ultra-ATA/133 PCI controllers in old mainboards. Our tests did not show any incompatibilities.

Because of their downward compatibility Ultra-ATA/133 drives run without any problems with Ultra-ATA/100, ATA/66, and ATA/33 interfaces as well. The drives will adapt their interface speed automatically to the slower interfaces.

In the Master/Slave operation mode of an Ultra-ATA/133 hard disk with an Ultra-ATA/33 or /66 drive at an IDE channel each of both can work in its highest transfer mode. In our test we did not find any difficulties.

Ultra-ATA/133 hard disks work with the current 80-core IDE ribbon cables. According to Maxtor no new cables with better sreening features are necessary for a stable Ultra-ATA/133 operation. Using a 40-core ribbon cable for the interface means forcing the drives automatically into the Ultra-ATA/33 operation mode. On the other hand, both types of cable have the 40-core plug in common.