External drive beats internal =0
 

So according to nero, my recently purchased external USB2 hard drive actually outperforms my internal IDE drive.

I wasn't expecting that. Both are 7200RPM. My Internal drive is a Hitachi Deskstar thing, and my external is a LaCie 250Gb Porsche thing (USB2).

http://img290.imageshack.us/img290/820/untitled1yl1.png

Also worth noting I guess; adding my music collection in winamp from the internal drive takes about 7 minutes (reading every ID3 tag), wheras it's closer to 2 mins from the external. Sexy.

This leads me to beleive perhaps there's something wrong with my internal setup. Both my IDE channels are operating at Ultra DMA Mode 2. My motherboard supports ATA-133 ~

I am using really old (from around 1997) 40-wire IDE cables; so could that be a reason?

That would be the exact reason. You need an 80-wire IDE cable for UDMA modes 5 and 6 which are ATA-100 and ATA-133 respectively.

The external drive will still perform slightly better once you get the internal drive running in Mode 6 as the extra 6 megs of cache on the external will still make a significant difference.

Except that the USB2 bus can't carry NEARLY as much bandwidth as ATA100, much less ATA133. Any Internal drive should KILL any external drive. Period.

I've seen quality firewire drives beat 5400rpm internal drives. But other than that extreme, I don't see it happening. Internal is faster.

Try this trick first - http://winhlp.com/WxDMA.htm (long story short, uninstall your IDE-drivers, reboot and the settings will be restored it's CAN'T go wrong, trust me).

If the thing doesn't set itself in Ultra DMA Mode 5 (highest available), it may just be the cables indeed. Get yourself a new pair for a few bucks and see if it works.

Note that this is only true if you use the (crappy) default Microsoft IDE drivers supplied with XP. Most (if not all) onboard controller manufacturers (like NVIDIA) have better IDE drivers that don't alter UDMA modes. If you have the option, use them. The MS IDE drivers sacrifice transfer speed in favor of stability (which isn't an issue if you're using decent quality IDE cabling).

Actually, if his motherboard supports ATA-133 (which he states), the highest available mode ist UDMA mode 6 (as long as the drive supports it, of course). Also note that 80-ribbon IDE cables are a technical requirement for modes 5 and 6 to work (as stated by Cetra). You won't squeeze these speeds out of an old 40-ribbon cable.

I used a motherboard with Nvidia somethingforcewhatever2, and it still switched back to PIO-mode. Then again, I might be confused with my old computer, which didn't have that.

Most probably because you were still using the default IDE drivers.

The NVIDIA IDE driver for nForce2 boards doesn't "support" DMA fallback whatsoever. In fact, even NVIDIA themselves don't recommend installing their highly optimized drivers because there are numerous issues with certain drives and CD/DVD writers in particular. I just happen to be one of the lucky ones benefitting from a considerable increase in IDE transfer speeds with their driver set without experiencing any compatibility or stability issues at all. Both my parallel ATA drives work just fine in ATA-133/UDMA-6 mode since day one.

As far as I know, they aren't even a standard component of their unified nForce driver packages and have to be installed seperately.

Problem is, I was using an on-board network-card, so I had to install the drivers.

All or nothing...

Not really. Though ATA-133 drives can burst up to 133MB/sec, the average speed tends to be around 50MB/Sec give or take 10MB/sec depending on how much cache the drive has which is well within the max 480Mbps (60MB/sec) USB2.0 transfer rate. Overall you'll get the same performance from an ATA-133 drive though a USB2.0 cable or though an EIDE cable.

Now if we're talking SATA then there is no question which is faster.

Yeah, but all USB 2.0 drives are basically standard ATA-100/133 drives with IDE->USB converter chips. The overhead from converting between the two standards overshadows any difference that cache sizes would make.

The Hitachi 7K80 isn't a very good drive IMHO, but I would still expect it to be faster than any USB 2.0 or Firewire 400 drive. A Hitachi T7K250 (which is a huge improvement over the 7K80, BTW) or any reasonably modern Western Digital Caviar should blow any removeable drive out of the water easily no matter what interface it's using. Try hooking it up with a new 80-lead IDE cable, and you'll probably notice a big jump in system performance.

actually, it's not like SATA drives are all of a sudden faster than the 50MB/sec quote you posted. that number is generally a limitation of today's hard drives, not the interface. now if you're doing a raid setup, then those rates might actually mean something, but they don't without that.

also, usb cables can theoretically transfer data at 480mbps, but many motherboards that have usb do not come close to this: the fastest ones tend to be around 300mbps, which would give you 37.5MB/s.

Wow, thanks for all the replies. I can go get some EIDE cables today as a matter of fact, so I'll post results back later.

I'm guessing ocne they're in there that windows won't automatically do anything and I'll have to use Grawl's method ~

Double Post:
Ah, thanks guys =D I got some new IDE cables and checked to see that I'm now in UDMA mode 6. Check it out:

http://img207.imageshack.us/img207/8908/untitled0ft.png

It's noticeably faster, such as loading games / huge amounts of music etc =D