Promise Ultra 66 - Ultra ATA/66 Controller
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 25, 1999 8:13 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Promising Ultra Performance
| With the need for the standard explained, leave it to Promise to come out with the first controller card to support the standard. The Promise Ultra 66 is a half-length PCI card that acts as your basic secondary IDE controller with support for the Ultra ATA/66 standard. This means that the card can function as both a standard controller card (with backwards compatibility for Ultra ATA/33 and prior devices) and an Ultra ATA/66 card. |
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| As mentioned above, one of the stipulations
for full Ultra ATA/66 compliance, aside from the controller card, is the 40-pin
80-conductor cable, which Promise wisely included in the Ultra 66's package. The rest of the Ultra 66's package consists of a general User's Manual, although the documentation is primarily an installation guide, it would've been nice had Promise included a better section on troubleshooting. |
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The physical installation of the Ultra 66 flew by in a matter of seconds, AnandTech's custom built system based on the ABIT BX6 Revision 2.0 quickly accepted the new hardware upon entry into Windows 98. The Ultra 66 was detected by Windows' Add New Hardware Wizard as a SCSI controller card, and using the supplied drivers disk, the drivers were physically installed and the system rebooted. Since the Ultra 66 card requires an IRQ for proper operation, in the case of AnandTech's setup, IRQ 9, there is room for a number of possible conflicts with the hardware installation. To no surprise, the Ultra 66 conflicted with the test system's Digital 21140 PCI Ethernet Card, however after a removal of the Ethernet Card's drivers and a reinstall of the same drivers things went smoothly.
The Ultra 66 can also be viewed as support for 4 additional IDE devices, and when you combine that with the 4 devices your motherboard already supports, if you find yourself needing to use more than 4 IDE devices, the Ultra 66 expands your capacity to 8 drives. The Ultra 66 offers, as briefly mentioned before, two independent Ultra ATA/66 channels that are backwards compatible with Ultra ATA/33.
Overall the card itself is what you can expect from a controller card, it's not going to be a revolutionary design, and at the same time, it's not going to be a problematic peripheral.
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