[Stealth]

So my 160 GB Western Digital hard drive arrived today (Special edition:  8 MB Buffer ) and it comes with that Ultra card for hard drives that are greater than 137 MB (which is the maximum that all current windows operating systems can support)... now i'm wondering, should I

A)  Install the card, and plug the hard drive into the card, thereby allowing me to have the full 160 GB on one partition.

B)  Just partition the hard drive, and plug it into the motherboard's IDE as normal.

See, the advantages of installing the card and plugging the hard drive into it, would be that i could have one partition, have more than 4 devices hooked up, and it would allow the hard drive to operate at its full speed... the disadvantages are that i'd have to install stuff to allow the hard drive to boot up windows... this is OK, but whenever problems occur, i'm stuck figuring the problems out as well asdealing with the card's drivers.  Also, if i use the card, utilities such as Scandisk and Defrag are possibly not going to work.  Also (finally), the Hard Drive activity LED won't be able to work.

So what do you recommend (in your experience) that i do?  Should i go with the card despite the list of disadvantages?  Do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages?  Are there ways around the problems i've listed?  I'm really new to using these cards, so any help would be appreciated

[IceFire]

The fact that it lets you use the full speed and capabilities of the hard drive seem to outweigh what I'd call relatively minor problems that you otherwise run into.

I'd go the card route if I were installing it.  Unless you run into serious trouble.

[Stealth]

even though i can't defrag or scandisk you think it'll be worth it?

[IceFire]

How often do you use defrag and scandisk?  I certainly don't very often...defrag in particular is less useful according to the techies I've talked to with recent hard drives than in previous drives.

[vyper]

Card.

[StratComm]

That's not exactly true, as it depends on what you are using the drive for.  I've used drives where I was writing, deleting, copying and overwriting 2 Gb files, and it got extremely fragmented and slow.  However, for normal use you don't use defrag now on most systems, as NTFS tends to take good care of itself.

[Stealth]

so card seems to be the best bet i guess...

although i'm not sure about not having Scandisk :-/... actually i'm not familar with XP at all, so does XP really use scandisk as much as 95, 98, 2000, etc.?

[StratComm]

I've never seen it used, so I wouldn't be too concerned.