Introduction
ATA100 is the next logical step in the hard-drive industry's never-ending quest to provide better performance. Like its predecessors ATA/66 and ATA/33, it requires a motherboard or add-on controller card to provide the necessary logic, and it requires a special hard drive designed to respond to the signals they provide.
First Up
Promise is one of the first companies to ship an add-in card for PCI-capable PCs. Its Promise Ultra100 Controller works great in Windows 2000, too.
One of the first mainboards to hit the market with support for ATA100 is from Asus. The company, in May 2000, announced a new board for FC-PGA and Thunderbird processors dubbed The CUSL2 (i815 Solano) board. This mainboard has an additional feature that we're sure will appeal to performance enthusuasts and overclockers: it will automatically slow down when faced with an overheated CPU! This feature, essentially, is like the "SpeedStep" feature introduced in recent mobile Pentium III products, released by Intel early in 2000.
And IBM was early out of the gate with its 45GB (ATA/100) Deskstar 75GXP hard drive.
Expect to see a wave of other products offering ATA100 support in the second half of 2000.
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