pci hard drive controller

Simple question is WHY. Working on a Dell XPS T600r p3/600. Machine has a pci hard drive controller and again I am wondering why ??? With a normal Primary and Secondary controller why is there a need for the pci card to control the hard drive.

 

In device manager its listed under scsi devices as a Promise Ultra66 IDE Controller.

Its only a 20g hard drive. Quantum which I am not a fan of.

 

A few I could think of. Wanted to use a ATA 133 or ATA 100 and the board controller is ATA 66. With the card you can use a larger hard. My old Aptiva would only see up to a 4.2 GB and with the card I put in it will go to 32 GB. There was a problem with the on-board controller.

 

I looked at the specs from Dell and from what I see it already was a 100mhz and the drive is an ata100. It does say it shipped with the machine but still not sure why its here. The bios date is 2000 so it should be able to handle a larger hard drive and being its a p3/600 thats not that old.

I could see if the machine was older than a p3 then okay but not a p3. Maybe you could look at the specs and see what you see. The service tag number is ddsep.

 

Correction it does say the board is a 66.

 

What I am reading is that it is for performance...

- http://support.ap.dell.com/docs/storage/3544t/En/intro.htm
- http://www.hardwarecentral.com/hardwarecentral/reviews/174/1/

 

Thanks for your reply. Question though still not really sure why this device was put in this machine by Dell. I have in the past put many ata100 h.d. in machines going back to p2/300 - 400mhz with no problems and most likely some of those machine were 66 boards.

So if I remove this device and set it up as one normally would by using the primary and secondary would there be a problem ????