How much can it really matter, an ATA-133 drive (or even a SCSI or FC drive) only has so much cache until you are limited by the physical access speed of the drive. So after you exhaust 8M or so of on drive cache, you then have to wait for disk access.
I used this example when I would teach, so the numbers are a bit old, but today the peformance difference is even greater.
Take a disk drive with 10ms access time and compare it with RAM that has a 60ns access time. (I know today's RAM is even faster, but work with me here.)
Let's convert these into numbers we all understand. Since you and I don't deal well with 60nS, let's just change that to 60 seconds. So we take 60ns and multiply by 10^9 to get 60.
But we have to do the same with the 10ms drive access time. When we multiply 10ms by 10^9 we get 10^7 seconds access time.
Do you realize how long 10^7 or 10 million seconds is? There are 86400 seconds in a day, so we are looking at something like 115 days.
That is the difference between drive access speeds and RAM. What you can fetch from memory in 60 seconds can take the equivalent of 115 days to get off a disk, if we transpose the times to things humans can understand.
So those ATA-133 drives may be able to fill the channel for short bursts, most of the time, you simply are waiting for the head to move, and the platter to rotate.
So I wouldn't worry about flat vs ribbon cable for drive performance.
I'd buy more RAM.
TB
