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I'm building a computer for myself quite nice setup
P42.8
ASUS P4C800 Motherboard
256MB Video Card
1GB Ram
etc.
My question is my motherboard says it can use Serial ATA or Ultra DMA IDE. I"ve been looking at a lot of hard drives, and most of them says Ultra ATA. Will the Ultra ATA work with Ultra DMA.
A simple google search revealed:
Seagate Ultra ATA Frequently Asked Questions
Serial ATA - The Dawn of a New Era
Tom's Hardware Guide Back To The Future:Serial ATA Arrives At Last
The Serial ATA Working Group
You can now probably answer your own question.
Just check the manufactures. Last I checked only Maxtor was making ATA133 drives ( a while ago )
Iknownot's post was very complete... concerning the links offered. To save you some to read:
Serial ATA is a new ATA standard, and seagate is taking the lead in this. It's faster than the normal Ultra ATA (Enhanced IDE) modes (the dma is basicly the mode where your disks operate in) 133 / 100 / 66 / 33 MB/s. Serial ata goes at 150 MB/s. It requires special cabling drives and ports... all present on your hardware, the only thing it also requires is a lot of $$$. Looking at the other specs of your box; Asus i875 800 fsb mobo and Intel P4 2.8 Mhz, that little additional cost is not going to be a problem? not? ;) It's still cheaper (and slower) than the SCSI products on the market today.
On a side note: the S-ATA standard is fairly new, and you can not except huge speed differences, in fact the earliest SATA drives are not that much faster than good 7200rpm ATA drives with 8MB buffer. They (SATA) are faster but the difference remains small. Although The cables are nicer ;)
The mobo you have there has RAID for the S-ATA and the normal IDE/ata so if you want to increase the speed/performance of your box, use raid stripping mode, this will split disk access over two identical drives (offcourse you have to install 2 identical drives to use this) making drive access faster.