The WinFast sports a CMD 648 chip controller at its heart, which makes sure everything works properly. It has 4 ide channels, with 2 of them supporting the new ata/66 standard. That gives you support for all of your ide devices and allows for expansion in the future. Installation was very easy, only requiring me to plug in the cables and insert the card into a PCI slot. The drivers installed smoothly but offered no spectacular features.

Performance

On the issue of Performance it definitely gave more of an increase than I was expecting. It showed a huge increase of 40% compared to just hooking up the drive to an ata/33 supporting motherboard. This kind of phenomenal performance increase shows that ATA/66 is an improvement over ATA/33, but hard drives still have a long way to come. On a side note, I would expect the higher rpm of ata/66 drives along with the majority of them boasting larger buffers and lower access times, to also help performance increase. Hard drives have always moved slowly compared to the rest of the components in the system and are continuing to do slow. But at least until ATA/100 comes out, we can expect 2nd and 3rd generation ata/66 hard drives to boast quite a nice performance increase and possible rpm speeds of 10k. At least, I am hoping that they do along with 4mb buffers and below 7ms access times.

Next >>

<< Previous