Hey i saved up my money and I got for $95 shipped and with a free SCSI controller card a 200gb hard drive. I installed the hard drive without the controller card, buy attatching it as a slave drive, now I want to know what is the advantage of the controlelr card, and only 186gb of the hard drive shows up, how can I make it the 200gb size?

Are you sure its a SCSI controller and drive? If it was SCSI the drive would not work if it was attached to the onboard IDE.

What is the brand name of the controller? Did you read the manual?

The advantage is additional capacity, most motherboards you can only have 4 drives and if you want to add RAID capibilities to your PC. You can get built in RAID on the higher end motherboards.

The SCSI controller have to be flashed to be able to access up to 200 gigabytes or more. This goes the same for IDE controllers.

Maxtor IBM, and Seagate has a 146 gigabyte SCSI hard drive that cost over 800 US dollars. It sounds like you got an IDE hard drive, but I think its useds or a returned item. Still 200 gigabytes IDE hard drives cost over 300 US dollars.

The use of an additional controller is you can have more mediums in your system. If you want RAID there are software RAID (eats cpu processes) and hardware RAID (has on-board cpu) controllers. RAID gives you speed and security although there are several different forms of RAID. Most common RAID is 0 (stripping), 1 (mirroring), and 5 (stripping + parity). Very rarely companies uses RAID 10 (stripping + mirroring). RAID 10 has tons of names like 1-0, 0-1, 1+0, 0+1, etc but they all are the same.

Its an IDE hard drive that's currently my Slave(not for long ^.^) And it Has an ATA card, I'm not too good with hardware
How would I "flash" my hard drive(wouldn't I have to "flash my bios"?, and isn't that risky?"

No, you wouldn't have to flash your hard drive, it's the IDE controller that is limiting the hard drive size. There are two sorts of IDE controllers: integrated on the motherboard, and plug-in cards (the latter is what probably came with your hard drive). You flash the motherboard BIOS to fix the integrated IDE controller, and you flash the plug-in card (it has its own BIOS) to fix it. You will need to visit the motherboard and/or the IDE controller card's manufacturer website to see if they have a fix for their respective IDE controllers. Depending on their age, they may not. Flashing any BIOS is risky; you need to find the procedure on the manufacturer's website and follow their instructions exactly.

The controller card that came with the hard drive will be able to see the entire capacity of the hard drive.

I plugged in the ata controller card into the PCI slot on the motherboar, but windows wont detect it, do I have to connect my hard drive to it as well?

What would be the setup(ATA Controller Card included) if I wanted my current 20gb to be the master and the 200gb to the slave?

Also I have a regular 20 gb hard drive that shouls up as 18.6gb, can anyone tell me how to get it at its maximum capacity?

Yes, you need your hard drive connected to the controller card for Windows or Linux to be interested in it. If you watch the boot sequence, you'll see the ATA controller card being recognised if it is working, but the messages will talk about no devices (ie, hard drives) being found. Connect your hard drive to the controller and the boot sequence should then identify the drive, after which Windows and Linux will become interested in it.

To set up your 20 GB drive as master and the 200 GB as slave, set the jumper on the back of the drives to 'master' and 'slave' as you want them set, then connect them to one of the IDE connectors on the ATA controller card with the same cable.

Your 20 GB hard drive is probably OK at 18.6 GB. Hard drive manufacturers lie when they tell us the capacity of their drives. To them, 20 GB is really 20 thousand million bytes (ie, 20,000,000,000 decimal) not 20 x 1024 MB. Convert 20 thousand million to real GB, take away filesystem overhead, and 18.6 GB is pretty close to what you get.

Thanks we need more responses like that: terse and everything you need, im still sad about 186 mb, from my new 200gb hard drive, it even says on the cover 200gb!