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blacksheep

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Hard disks - jargon

Help!
I am about to buy a promise fast track pci raid controller for my video work and 4*10gb drives but it says i need to buy Ultra ATA drives.

I have been looking through magazines and am totally confused. Some manufactures say their drives are ATA others say UDMA33.

I need to buy drives with the fastest access time and fastest rotation speed.

The Quantum fireball has 9.5m/s access time and 5400 rotation speed and is ATA.

But the Maxtor's have 9m/s access time and 7200 rotation speed but are UDMA33.

Is Ultra ATA the same as Ultra DMA?
If not what's the difference?
And why can I only use ATA drives?
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blacksheep

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Note: When I mention ATA above, I am refering to Ultra ATA.
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semontgomery

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Buy IBM or seagate drive (IBM is the fastes )  For video work I will go with scsi card adaptec and seagate SCSI drive they are expensive yes but very fast and always fast not like ULTRA DMA DRIVERS that will be once faster once slower and sometimes you will transfer data at 33MB and because ide drive uses cpu to transfer data you will need real fast cpu.
Thanks for the excellent info.

JBURGHARDT
IDE Raid are faster than Ultra Wide SCSII - If you attatch 4 drives together to act as one you can achieve very high sustained data rates of which are more than enough for my needs (S-VHS Quality) - and all this for over 3 times cheaper than the SCSII alternative.

Hopefully this should force down the price of scsii drives in the future.