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When IDE ATA 33 drives were introduced onto the scene a couple of years ago, it left some people scratching their head, wondering just how much faster those drives actually were than normal IDE drives, and how close they were getting to SCSI performance. People soon learned that there was indeed a speed increase, however slight, when ATA33 drives were attached to an accommodating controller, and in spite of the minute performance improvement, the new drives rapidly became the standard for desktop hard drives. In addition, some SCSI owners who were purchasing new machines saw the price difference in replacing their machines that had SCSI configurations with IDE configurations and started to use these drives in their machines to handle multiple network file requests, (like in a File/Print server) and as fault tolerant solutions as well.

In 1999 we saw the emergence of a even faster IDE interface called ATA66. Similar to ATA 33, ATA66 boasted SCSI like performance, yet failed to even push the envelope significantly even in the IDE arena. As with ATA 33, it does require a special controller card to work correctly, an ATA 66 controller- and because of the high-speed data throughout, it also requires a special ATA 66 cable. This cable has 40 pin connectors on both ends, but 80 wires connecting the 40 pins together, to help with things like cross talk, and data corruption.

Now that covers the basics on drives, how about controllers? As mentioned before, SCSI drive arrays require special SCSI controller cards. Although some people were starting to switch to ATA 33 drives, they were generally only doing so with new machines, because only certain system boards would handle the ATA 33 interface, and the new machines were coming shipped with the controller already on board. Some desktop owners who wanted the performance without buying a new system board, however, were buying a separate controller board to accommodate their new ATA 33 drives.

The migration to ATA 66 was no different. Only newer motherboards support these newer IDE drives, and unless you had one, your only other option was to buy a separate controller card to handle these drives as well.