Hack 60 Upgrade Your IDE Interface

If you are stuck with a slower ATA-33, ATA-66, or ATA-100 IDE interface on your system board and want to soup up the system with an ATA-133 drive, you can disable the built-in interface, install a new IDE interface board, connect your new super-fast drive with a shiny new 80-wire cable, and zoom ahead.

Promise Technology (http://www.promise.com) offers two replacement Ultra ATA adapters: the Ultra100 TX2 and the Ultra133 TX2. These interface cards and similar versions from other manufacturers like Belkin (http://www.belkin.com) are available through computer retailers for $50 and up.

The adapters can only enhance the performance of systems with a 66 MHz PCI bus, so the upgrade is not effective for users of Pentium I and some Pentium II system boards with only 33 MHz PCI speed.

To upgrade your present system with a faster EIDE add-in card, follow these steps:

Following the add-on card manufacturer's instructions, install the card and drivers.
Install your hard drive and connections for data and power.
Start up your PC and verify that the new drive interface and drive are identified and available for use.
If you are going to use your new drive for data only, partition and format the drive using your operating system's disk management tools or third-party utilities. If you are going to boot and run the operating system from the new drive, do the following:
1. To preserve your current operating system, application programs, and data, use a disk-cloning program like Symantec's Ghost [Hack #95] to copy your old drive to the new drive.
2. After cloning, shut down the system and remove your old drive unless you are going to use it as an extra data drive. If you remove the old drive, restart the system and access your system BIOS menu to select which drive you want the BIOS to boot the system from. If the old drive is to remain as a spare data drive, you can either erase all of the old data or reformat the drive.