Although ATA133 is hot topic when it comes to motherboards, it's a shame that the hard disk drive market hasn't kept up since almost every new board now supports the ATA133 or the Ultra DMA Mode 6 standard, but there are only a handful of drives that are actually compatible. ATA133 suggests that a capable hard drive can theoretically push 133MB/s in burst mode, much like how memory bandwidth is talked about. This figure is somewhat artificial, and real-world performance is what counts in the end, which is precisely what the following pages are about. We go over a brief but direct comparison between ATA100 and ATA133 (Ultra DMA modes 5 and 6) with one of the original ATA133 drives - the Maxtor D740X-6L.