Would ATA 133 card help old SE440BX motherboard?

I would like to add a 40 or 80 gig hard drive to my Dell XPS 400 with an
Intel SE440BX motherboard (running on Windows 2000). Is a ATA 133 card
compatible and will it help recognize a larger hard drive. The Dell tech
support line (which is always wrong these days) says the largest hard drive
the board can currently read is 16 gig. However, they also told me I
couldn't run Windows 2000 which I'm doing with no problems.

Any help is appreciated.

I should also add that the chip is a Pentium II, 400 mhz.

Moe Hair opened in
t:

I would like to add a 40 or 80 gig hard drive to my Dell XPS 400 with an
Intel SE440BX motherboard (running on Windows 2000). Is a ATA 133 card
compatible and will it help recognize a larger hard drive. The Dell
tech support line (which is always wrong these days) says the largest
hard drive the board can currently read is 16 gig. However, they also
told me I couldn't run Windows 2000 which I'm doing with no problems.

Any help is appreciated.

An ATA100/ATA133 expansion card will work well with a large drive. Your motherboard might support an 80 GB drive without an expansion card. You might need a BIOS update to support drives larger than 8 GB. If it supports drives over 8 GB it should work with a much larger drive, at least 80 GB.

Moe Hair wrote:

I would like to add a 40 or 80 gig hard drive to my Dell XPS 400 with an
Intel SE440BX motherboard (running on Windows 2000). Is a ATA 133 card
compatible and will it help recognize a larger hard drive. The Dell tech
support line (which is always wrong these days) says the largest hard drive
the board can currently read is 16 gig. However, they also told me I
couldn't run Windows 2000 which I'm doing with no problems.

Any help is appreciated.

--
Mike Walsh
West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S.A.

Certainly 32GB. There is a BIOS dated 1999 on Intel Support, it may support
more.

"Moe Hair" wrote in message
t...
I would like to add a 40 or 80 gig hard drive to my Dell XPS 400 with an
Intel SE440BX motherboard (running on Windows 2000). Is a ATA 133 card
compatible and will it help recognize a larger hard drive. The Dell tech
support line (which is always wrong these days) says the largest hard drive
the board can currently read is 16 gig. However, they also told me I
couldn't run Windows 2000 which I'm doing with no problems.

Any help is appreciated.

On Fri, 12 Mar 2004 17:38:04 GMT, Moe Hair wrote:

I would like to add a 40 or 80 gig hard drive to my Dell XPS 400 with an
Intel SE440BX motherboard (running on Windows 2000). Is a ATA 133 card
compatible and will it help recognize a larger hard drive. The Dell tech
support line (which is always wrong these days) says the largest hard drive
the board can currently read is 16 gig. However, they also told me I
couldn't run Windows 2000 which I'm doing with no problems.

Any help is appreciated.

It's most likely the board natively supported at least up to 32GB, but you
may need a bios update to support up to 128GB or larger.

Even so, the board can only support up to ATA33. You'd have a significant
performance increase by using an ATA133 PCI IDE controller, which should
be compatible and would support 40-80GB and larger drives without having
to update the motherboard bios.

Moe Hair's log on stardate 12 ožu 2004

I would like to add a 40 or 80 gig hard drive to my Dell XPS 400 with
an Intel SE440BX motherboard (running on Windows 2000). Is a ATA 133
card compatible and will it help recognize a larger hard drive.

Compatibile? Well, if you use any PCI (or whatever bus your MBO supports)
ATA controller, certanly. Will it help? Hmm, it it hard to tell. It
depends on your drive and controller. In theory, controller comunicates
with drive's cache, and there is no reason why it wouldn't communicate at
very high speed (~30 MB/s constantly, wich is more than sufficient). Yet
again, bursting with ATAxxx can go as high as 80 MB/s, but IMHO, it's no
use. Basicly, you have to spend money on controller, but if you plan tu
use drive extensivly, you should think about changeing whloe configuratio.
All in all, i'd leave it as it is, and lay on W2k to recognise the drive.

The Dell tech support line (which is always wrong these days) says the
largest hard drive the board can currently read is 16 gig. However,
they also told me I couldn't run Windows 2000 which I'm doing with no
problems.

Since you use W2k, and you plan to use bigger drive as a secondary (not as
a boot drive), than you don't have to bother with additional controllers,
since W2k will recognise drive without any problem, even it BIOS won't.

My 0.02$.


--
Ja sjedoh, svi sjedoshe
Ja ustah, svi ustashe!

Thanks for all your advice. What I may do is buy the Maxtor 80 or 120 gig
HD which comes with their ATA 100 controller (or 133 - I'm not sure).

I was checking the Dell site as this is a Dimension XPS 400 computer.
Some people have upgraded their processors to 1000 FSB Pentium III or
Celeron 1.4 gigahertz chips. The Dell specs say that all these SE440bx
intel boards can handle is 3x128 SDRAM 168 pin DIMMS yet these guys say
they're using 3x256mg SDRAM SIMMS chips because of the last Phoenix BIOS
upgrade (which I have).

It's amazing how Dell support doesn't know the maching can handle Windows
2000 or that the board (with the BIOS upgrade) can read larger hard
drives. So much for outsourcing loads of jobs to India.

Bubba opened in
:

Moe Hair's log on stardate 12 ožu 2004

I would like to add a 40 or 80 gig hard drive to my Dell XPS 400 with
an Intel SE440BX motherboard (running on Windows 2000). Is a ATA 133
card compatible and will it help recognize a larger hard drive.

Compatibile? Well, if you use any PCI (or whatever bus your MBO
supports) ATA controller, certanly. Will it help? Hmm, it it hard to
tell. It depends on your drive and controller. In theory, controller
comunicates with drive's cache, and there is no reason why it wouldn't
communicate at very high speed (~30 MB/s constantly, wich is more than
sufficient). Yet again, bursting with ATAxxx can go as high as 80 MB/s,
but IMHO, it's no use. Basicly, you have to spend money on controller,
but if you plan tu use drive extensivly, you should think about
changeing whloe configuratio. All in all, i'd leave it as it is, and lay
on W2k to recognise the drive.

The Dell tech support line (which is always wrong these days) says the
largest hard drive the board can currently read is 16 gig. However,
they also told me I couldn't run Windows 2000 which I'm doing with no
problems.

Since you use W2k, and you plan to use bigger drive as a secondary (not
as a boot drive), than you don't have to bother with additional
controllers, since W2k will recognise drive without any problem, even it
BIOS won't.

My 0.02$.

"Moe Hair" said in t:
I would like to add a 40 or 80 gig hard drive to my Dell XPS 400 with
an Intel SE440BX motherboard (running on Windows 2000). Is a ATA 133
card compatible and will it help recognize a larger hard drive. The
Dell tech support line (which is always wrong these days) says the
largest hard drive the board can currently read is 16 gig. However,
they also told me I couldn't run Windows 2000 which I'm doing with no
problems.

Any help is appreciated.

I had a 3+ year-old AOpen AX6BC motherboard with a Slot1 Pentium3 800MHz
E (enhanced on-die cache). The mobo use the Intel 440BX chipset. It
was a rock solid performer. However, the mobo's IDE ports (because of
the 440BX chipset) only supported ATA-4 (UDMA mode 2 for 33MB/s). That
was fine for my first couple of hard drives but eventually I ended up
with two 40GB hard drives with one at UltraDMA-100 spinning at 7200RPM
(used for the OS and apps) and the other at UltraDMA-66 spinning at
5400RPM (for data).

I went with the Promise Ultra100 IDE controller card to provide better
support of the drives. It also allowed me to put the driver-only
supported ATAPI devices (CD-RW and DVD-ROM) each on their own IDE
channel using the mobo's IDE ports and move the hard drives to the
UltraDMA-100 capable controller card and each on its own channel there.
Unfortunately, this card was a bit flaky. On most boots, both drives
were detected. On occasion, however, the 2nd hard drive got missed. A
warm reboot wouldn't work. A cold reboot was needed to have the POST
have the CPU issue a reset signal to all devices to put the Promise
controller in a known and base state. When I went to sell the old 440BX
box, I decided to remove the Promise card since I figured the buyer
wouldn't like a flaky card and would prefer usability and stability over
speed. However, I immediately noticed the drop in performance. So I
went to eBay and bought a Promise Ultra100 TX2 controller card. Many
users that buy the Western Digital drives over 120GB in size would get
this controller included in the drive package. They didn't need it so
they would sell it off cheap at eBay. I got one for $25 (after shipping
costs were added). This card worked great and the drives were at top
speed again.

The only caveat when using an IDE controller card, or even a SCSI
controller, is that during the install of NT-based Windows that you need
to hit F6 to tell it that you will later be loading the drivers for that
controller. Since the IDE and SCSI controllers have their own BIOS and
perform the geometric translation between the OS and the hard drives,
they all get treated like SCSI controllers. You hit F6 near the very
beginning of the install and later you get prompted to insert the floppy
with the driver for the BIOS-controlled host controller adapter. If you
don't hit F6, you won't get prompted, and the setup will eventually
report that no mass storage devices (i.e., hard drives) were found.
Unfortunately, the OS doesn't then remember to use those "SCSI" drivers
when booting into Recovery Console mode (used on occasion to fix a
broken system) and you'll again have to remember to hit F6 and insert
the floppy.

You will notice a speed boost going from UltraDMA-33 to UltraDMA-66.
From UltraDMA-66 and up, you'll see little improvement. While the
hardware benchmarks showed my drives were much faster on the Promise
card, the ones more important are the application benchmarks to emulate
real-world use. Because I kept my drives defragmented, and by having
each on its own channel by using separate IDE ports for every drive,
what was most noticeable was an improved snappiness in loading an
application due to the higher burst speed supported. I'm not running a
file server or SQL database that is in continual use so sustained
bandwidth for the drives isn't the issue; the OS and apps, once they got
read from the hard drive and loaded, won't run faster with drives faster
than UDMA-66, and the difference from UDMA-33 to UDMA-66 is measurable
but slight, like around 5% to 10% faster. But what I liked most about
using the Promise controller and getting the faster burst mode support
was that the OS and apps loaded faster. Windows got more snappy. That
was enough to make me happy and I figured it would please the buyer, so
the $25 was worth the expense, especially since the buyer was family.

Oh, for my first Promise controller, I did have to flash its BIOS to up
its support from 24-bit to 48-bits addressing so it would support hard
drives over 137GB in size. Promise never did provide an updated driver
for their Ultra100 card (well, they did but they yanked it). Instead
they had users use their Ultra100 TX driver. With the updated BIOS and
driver, I could have used larger drives. The Promise Ultra100 TX2 is
already 48-bit ready and its driver or the one included in Windows
(although, I think, you need to get SP1 for Windows XP) will support
large drives.

"Trent©" said in :
snip
Consider getting a serial ATA card...and the WD Raptor 10,000 rpm
drive!!
snip

If you don't mind the much louder noise from the faster spinning
platters along with a measly 36GB per drive. Well, I guess they now
have a 74GB Raptor SATA drive but it's pricey at around $227 (priced at
newegg.com). I can get two 80GB 7200RPM 8MB drives at $70 each along
with a Promise FastTrak RAID controller for $110 (if the mobo doesn't
include RAID) and double the bandwidth of the drives (because each is on
its own channel and using striping) to get better performance. Spend
$227 on a single drive that spins 38% faster or $240 on a RAID (with
striping) solution at 100% increase in bandwidth and which gives you
160GB of disk space instead of just 74GB. Unless I see some benchmarks
that show a 10,000RPM drive outperforms even a 2-drive (7200RPM),
2-channel RAID 0 setup, I'd go with the RAID solution, especially since
I would get more than double the disk space at a mere incremental cost
of $13. Of course, if you don't have room for 2 hard drives and a
controller (if needed) then you're stuck spending the premium price for
a single but faster spinning and much noisier drive.