Intel ATA driver makes PC run like the clappers

Now I realise you Reg regulars believe that us vultures have a serious and radical down on whatever it is that Intel is doing. But this could not be further from the truth.

Chipzilla has posted an updated UltraDMA driver here.

This is designed for the Caminogate chipset and the VC820 mobo in particular.

We tried the new driver on our reference VC820 and were astonished to discover that performance increased by three times between the original Win98 system and the new Win2K installation on the same hardware.

Initial hard disk SiSoft Sandra ratings under Win 98 were a disappointing 113.7 Mb/sec. After upgrading to Win 2K and the lovely new Ultra ATA 5.01 driver, the performance improved to an impressive 358.9 Mb/sec. How do these guys achieve this kinda improvement?

Maybe Intel should move into software. ®