One of the best price/performance additions I have ever made, was to
move my Maxtor Hard disk drive to a Promise Ultra 66 IDE controller
card.  I have some large 700Mbyte files that took 3 minutes to copy
(within the same drive) and that time was cut in half to 1 1/2 minutes
after I installed the Promise Ultra66 IDE controller card.   The Promise
card was around $20-25.  I also noticed that I was booting faster but I
did not measure the difference in booting, it was not as dramatic as the
file copying.  After that, I also purchased a Promise Ultra 100 IDE but
this card was not significantly faster than the Promise Ultra 66.  Now I
install the Promise Ultra 66 on any computers that I upgrade for
people.  On another computer I had 2 hard drives both using the Ultra 66
and I was able to copy a 700 Mbyte file in about 30 seconds :-o  I
verified that the file copied was valid and identical to the first.  I
was blown away on the speed of drive to drive copys!

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