Ultra ATA Card?
 

so, i got a new hd (160gb 7200 8mb WD) and it came with a free ultra ata controller card.

i was wondering what exactly this thing does and if it is worth it to put it in (it looks PCI and i have slots empty) (i havent opened the case up yet).

i have another 60gb drive in the system now and i was planning on partitioning the new drive up.

is the card of any use right now?

Your motherboard probably already supports the Ultra ATA133 standard. So, probably not worth it. You will need to use the ribbon cable that came with the drive -- unless you can tell that the old one is using the 80 conductor ribbon. Then again, if your mobo already supports the ulta ata133 standard, you probably already have the ribbon cables and this is all moot.

http://www.dell.com/images/global/to...ata100-001.gif

Now, if we're talking about serial ata then that would be different story since only the most recent mobo's carry support.

usually they give you the free one with +137GB drives since some motherboards/drivers dont support +137G drives

its useful if you want more than 4 IDE drives though

What it does: it has it's own BIOS that detects and directs harddisks. Therefore, if your own mobo BIOS doesn't work with a certain harddisk (because of it being a bit olde), the pci controller card will work.

Plus it also allows more than four IDE drives, like charliex said; very useful at times.

Yeah, only install it when you need more than 4 drives. If you install it now, it will slow your bootup time since it searches for more drives.