Quantum Fireball CX 13 GB HDD Review

In the meantime, Quantum has been licensing the technology out to others so that they may boast of ATA/66 compliance and to ensure industry standardization. Otherwise known as Ultra ATA/66, this technology doubles the effective hard disk transfer rates from the ATA/33 standard.

With continued growth in hard disk size and faster rotational speeds, internal transfer rates also went up. It was foreseen that in 1999, a bottleneck would be reached with the ATA/33 interface. So the ATA/66 standard was implemented to improve the interface and keep up with the internal data transfer rates and will be a cushion for further increases in internal transfer rates for around a couple of more years until these rates begin to exceed 66MB/sec.

Requirements

In order to utilize the potential of ATA/66, there are a few things that you will need. Firstly, you will need either a motherboard or an add on controller card that supports the ATA/66 protocol. Older motherboards based upon the Intel BX and LX chipsets do not support this option. If your current system runs on these chipsets, you will have to make use of an add on controller card as mentioned above if you want to take advantage of ATA/66.

Quite a number of non Intel chipset based motherboards do support ATA/66. Secondly you will require a 40-pin 80-conductor cable to set your hard drive running at 66MB/sec. The reason for this is that this new type of cable increases data integrity and reduces crosstalk. Crosstalk is a phenomenon that occurs when signals leak in to adjacent conductors. Within this newer type of cable, 40 extra ground wires are added to help protect against crosstalk.

But don't worry, these new cables are plug compatible with existing connectors. And ATA/66 drives are backward compatible so that you may use them on non ATA/66 compliant motherboards. Of course, you will be operating at ATA/33 (provided your board supports it) speeds. Lastly (and probably most obviously), you will require an ATA/66 capable hard disk drive. Software wise if your current OS supports ATA/33 transfers then you can be sure that it will support ATA/66 as well.

If you do not have a board which supports ATA/66, don't worry. This drive will work on current ATA/33 (and earlier) boards. Simply use your current 40-pin, 40-conductor cable and you set to go. A utility from Quantum is there where you can disable the ATA/66 feature of the drive to force it to run in ATA/33 mode. You can use this utility if needed, but from what I have seen, this drive works fine without it.