faheel - I have an old Pentium Pro 200 (four years old) with a VS440FX motherboard, the hard disk of which I have just upgraded with a Seagate Barracuda 28 Gb 7200 rpm UDMA-66 drive. This drive was the best IDE drive in PCW magazine in March. I was teetering between the limits of bravado and minimal knowledge in doing this but my experiences might be of help to you and others. My next step is to upgrade the motherboard and processor to get the full potential of the drive.
I ordered the drive through Dabs Direct who continually changed their delivery dates on me. After a month of this I cancelled the order and got one from SMC within four days. It’s not much use having the cheapest prices if you can’t deliver the goods on time.
I bought a Promise ATA-66 Controller Card from jungle.com for £46 and installed it in a PCI slot. It has its own BIOS (I still have the original motherboard BIOS version that came on delivery) so this gets over all the problems of the 8Gb limit with that chipset. The card also comes with a UDMA-66 ribbon cable.
As spannersatcx says, Novatech do an ATA-66 card with USB support. I bought this before the Promise card but could not get it to work even though my computer met all the requirements, ie PCI 2.1 compliant etc. Neither Novatech tech support nor the manufacturer could get the thing to work for me and I got my money back even though when tested by the manufacturer it was in working order. The Promise card was a dream to install and was designed much better than the Novatech one from the point of view of ease of connecting up cables and identifying IDE 1 and 2 once it was installed.
My only real problem was not realising that the drive was shipped in UDMA-33 mode (mode 2) – there was nothing in the manual to say that this was the case. The program needed to upgrade to UDMA-66 (mode 4) has to be downloaded from the Seagate website and can only be run whilst the drive is connected to the motherboard IDE connector – it will not run if you are connected to the Promise IDE connector!! In the near future Seagate are going to include this program on the Disk Manager software that comes with the drive. I can’t honestly say that I can tell the difference between UDMA-33 and –66 operations.
The other problem I had was that having used the very simple Seagate Disk Manager to fdisk and format the new drive it I was unable to use Partition Magic 5 to change partition sizes. After much deliberation with Partition’s technical support it became clear that the only way to get Partition Magic to work was to fdisk and format the drive again using DOS commands. This solved the problem – but by this time I had reloaded most of my programs and backup file data only to lose them again of course!
Hope all this helps.