ATA133 Hard Drive Question

are all these people newbs? All the newegg reviews on the ATA133 Maxtor hard drives have people saying something like "Make sure your motherboard has ATA133" and "this is such a low price for ATA133"...I thought that hard drives were incapable of reaching anywhere near even ATA100 speeds...

Another question. Does NF7-S have RAID onboard? I was a little unclear of that. Also if its SATA Raid do I need another serillel kit?

I'm about 95% sure you need a second serillel for SATA RAID.

Maxtor 8mb buffer can sustain approx 37mb/sec
and I've run them with an ata 100 and ata 133 MOBO
there was a diff of about 1mb/sec dunno why but it was consistant. Also burst speed which seem more important for most apps can reach close to 100mb/sec I think.

There is a reason for that.

Maxtor's implementation of ATA133/100 is not backwards compatible with older IDE controllers, which go up to ATA66 (which is an old school controller, nonetheless). All this means is that you can't pop your new 120GB drive in your old PII-333.

As for speeds, yes, its hard to SUSTAIN ATA100 speeds. Most apps can't do this because they won't do a a series of burst reads long enough to have the speed stabilize. Burst speeds are faster because there's less overhead in a burst transfer than a sequential-one-at-a-time transfer.

Maxtor's implementation of ATA 133 is a farce. Their drives can't even barely make ATA 66 useful, thats including a burst from the cache. So ATA 100's potential bandwidth is not even being filled, unless you have two great drives in a RAID 0 array, on the same channel. Maxtor's ATA 133 is simply marketing at its best.

The difference can just come from the implementation of the ATA controller. Some south bridges are more efficient than others, and tend to score better. The drives ability to actually send data is one component of transfer speed, and is the big limiting one. But advantages can be found in other area's, as there is communication going on between the device and its controller, and any shortening there will show benefits.