🚀 go-pugleaf

Yes and no.  The latest EIDE drives in fast systems typically have max
realworld throughputs of 4-7+/-  megs a sec. on average, reading more
or less sequential data and without other apps competing for CPU time.
16 megs a sec is for the drive electronics to the MB IDE iinterface.


While the drive interface  IO speed is a factor it does not impact
overall performance as greatly as drive platter to bus IO which is
affected  by drive head speed, platter spin rate etc.   

The main benefits of faster  MB's is not so much that their EIDE
interfaces are "advanced"  (vs a 486 system with EIDE capability like
yours)  but  that they will tend to have faster CPU's and as EIDE
drive IO is somewhat CPU bound in a real world multi-tasking Win 95
environment faster systems will generally be able to process these IO
tasks more quickly.   Newer MB's BIOS's will also have EIDE
enhancements such as UDMA which allow (theoretically) for BUS IO up to
around 33 megs a sec  however even the older 16 megs a sec EIDE IO
spec capability is not being strained by any drive now in production. 

IBM apparently has some EIDE screamers in the pipeline which may be
able to take significant advantage of  the faster UDMA IO speeds but I
don't think we'll see those at retail until well into  98.

I'm not directly familar with your Seagate model but assuming  it's a
year or two old and 851 megs you should see _some_ speed enhancement
with your drive on the newer MB for the aforementioned reasons
although it's unlikely to knock your socks off.  Drives are so cheap
your ST-3851A  is worth about $ 50.00 based on what you can buy in a
larger drive. New multi-gig drives are so inexpensive now it'd be best
to get a new one if you're upgrading your MB. You can get a UDMA 6.4
gig drive for around $ 360 or less. 

midigard@aol.com (Midgard) wrote:
>For months I've been listening to my brother boost about how lightning
>fast his standard EIDE hard drives are.  Claims it all depends the
>motherboard's controller on how fast a hard drive can get, up to the
>maximum rated speed for that drive of course.  Right now I'm using a
>486 VIP green Mainboard (M919) w/ an AMD P75 cpu & have *never* gotten
>more than 1,870 kb/sec using my Seagate ST-3851A HDD.  But you're
>always hearing about how these drives are capable of 16 MB/sec data
>transfer rates.  In a few weeks, I'll be upgrading to  a Socket 7
>mainboard with either an Intel 166MHZ MMX or AMD K6 166MHz.  But I'd
>like to keep my present drive & want to know once and for all if it's
>actually possible to get the maximum rated speed for these "older"
>EIDE drives?  Is it, in fact, the controller on the motherboard that
>determines data transfer rates with hard disks?  
>
>Best,
>Midgard
>
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