Controller PROMISE Technology Ultra66, PCI Local Bus, Ultra ATA/66, GW p/n: 6000934, OEM (контроллер)

PROMISE Technology Ultra66, PCI Local Bus, Ultra ATA/66

The first controller on the market to support Ultra ATA/66 is the Promise Ultra66. The Ultra66 is a small card with two IDE connectors. It has the following features:

• Two-to-three times faster than other IDE drive speeds
• Only controller/cable combination to support 66MB/sec burst data transfers of Ultra ATA/66 drives
• Bundles Ultra ATA/66 cable for higher speed and better signal integrity
• Backward compatibility supports UDMA/66, UDMA/33, EIDE, Fast ATA-2, and ATAPI devices
• Separate device timing per port allows running drives or devices at their highest rated speeds

Installation of the Ultra66 was very easy. First, connect the drive to the controller using the Ultra ATA/66 cable. (You will notice that the connectors are colored on these new cables. This is for a reason; the blue connector goes to the controller. The black connector goes to that Master drive, and the grey connector to the Slave drive.) Then reboot the computer and disable the onboard IDE controllers in BIOS. Finally reboot into your operating system and install the included drivers.

Some hard drives may require you to enable Ultra ATA/66 support. The 13GB Western Digital drive we used had to be enabled using a utility called WDATA66.EXE that is available from Western Digital’s web site. Once everything is enabled you can make sure, by watching the BIOS screen during boot-up, that the Ultra66 is recognized. Your hard drive should be detected using UDMA Mode 4. That is Ultra ATA/66.

We did run into some problems when installing and testing the Ultra66 card. Some incompatibilities were found with our SoundBlaster Live! card, and also with the USB drivers in Windows 98. As this is a pre-release board we are sure that Promise will fix these last-minute problems. A nice feature of the Ultra66 is the easily upgradable BIOS on the card via flash utility. This way you are assured that any unforeseen problems can be fixed.