Promise Ultra 66 - Ultra ATA/66 Controller

• Intel Pentium II 400 on an ABIT BX6 Revision 2.0
• Digital 21140 PCI Ethernet Adapter
• Promise Ultra 66 Controller Card
• Western Digital Caviar AC313000 13GB Ultra ATA/66 Hard Drive
• Matrox Millennium G200 AGP Graphics Accelerator
• Microsoft Windows 98

These benchmarks show the limitations a maximum burst transfer rate can impose on a high performing hard disk. With the Western Digital 13GB test drive, however, it seems as if the Ultra ATA/33 specification was all that was necessary for the drive as performance didn't really improve over Ultra ATA/33.

In the future, Western Digital's 7200 RPM drive line and other 7200 RPM Ultra ATA/66 drives may show a noticeable performance gain over standard Ultra ATA/33 solutions. Even then, the greatest performance increase will be in high end applications, and not in your conventional business applications (e.g. MS Word, Lotus Smart Suite, etc) according to the benchmark results below.

Right now, there is no need to go out and buy an Ultra ATA/66 hard disk, and because of this, there was no reason for Promise to rush to release the world's first Ultra ATA/66 controller card.

The Ultra 66 won't give you a huge performance increase over the rest of the world's storage technologies, not with today's Ultra 66 hard drives, however shortly, as more and more manufacturers begin shipping faster and larger Ultra ATA/66 hard disks (especially 7200 RPM drives) the need will rise.

With Intel supposedly waiting until September to include Ultra ATA/66 support in their chipsets, there will definitely be a need for a move to the Ultra ATA/66 between now and September, however at the time of publication, you're better off to wait and jump on the Ultra ATA/66 bandwagon when some real hard drives are released.

Expect the coming months to bring more 25GB drives and faster solutions that even break that 25GB barrier with flying colors. When that happens, then that'll be the time to pursue an Ultra 66 or a similar controller card, unless of course you happen to get lucky and find that your chipset supports Ultra ATA/66.

Until then, you can sit back and quietly chuckle at the wonderfully descriptive performance charts that you'll see on the backs of boxes, promising stellar performance, out of a product that has not yet matured to even close to that point.