"...Promise today announced the first and only Ultra ATA/100 controller card that supports newly announced Ultra ATA/100 drives with 100MB/sec transfer rates. The announcement coincides with the availability of Ultra ATA/100 drives using Quantum Corp. technology made public today by most major drive manufacturers.

The Ultra ATA/100 controller card, called the Ultra100, has a suggested list price of $49. Ultra100 from Promise Technology supports all features of Ultra ATA/100 drives, including 100MB/sec burst data transfers and CRC error- checking. The card also bundles with a free Ultra ATA 80-wire/40-pin cable that offers improved data reliability and signal integrity by adding 40 extra ground wires than standard 40-wire/40-pin ATA cables. Without the required cable, Ultra ATA/100 drives will only run at 33MB/sec.

Up to four drives and/or ATAPI devices are supported by the two Ultra ATA/100 ports on the Ultra100 card. Each port offers separate device timing to run each attached device at its highest-rated speed. Ultra100 also provides bus mastering for improved performance.

The Ultra100 onboard BIOS automatically recognizes Ultra ATA/100 drives and will be fully backward-compatible with other IDE drives -- including Ultra ATA/66, Ultra ATA/33, older IDE drives, CD-ROM/DVD drives and other ATAPI devices. Ultra100 co-exists with motherboard ATA ports, adding two additional ATA ports to a typical PCI system (version 2.1 or higher). This permits up to 8 internal ATA devices to be used..." NULL