External drive beats internal =0

Quote:

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.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Arainach

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.

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.

There's nowhere I can't reach.