Performance from SATA drive in an Dimension 4500

Hello,

What should one anticipate in terms of performance if I added a Promise SATA controller card and a SATA drive in an Dimension 4500? The 4500 doesn't have SATA ports on the motherboard (2.8ghz P4 system is 3 years old this month), hence the need for the SATA controller.

Would performance be the same, similar or greatly reduce because of the use of a PCI controller card. I installed one of the Western Digital 10,000 RPM SATA drives (the 36 gig version) thinking that this could be a fast drive in my system. I installed only Windows XP and my most used apps on it and everything else on another drive. But now I ask, would going thru the PCI bus negate any performance advantage to this REALLY fast hard drive?

And could this config make XP more stable? Many times I've gotten the dreaded "Blue Screen of rest" stating something about a hardware device (drive I think) after a several months of use, but since I've been using this SATA drive, I've yet to have that problem. And I've had several different IDE drives installed. Could there be a problem with the IDE controller on my motherboard. My IDE drive (which I don't boot from) and my optical drives work fine and Dell Diagnostics checked out OK too. Or could I chalk it up to spyware on my system. Previously I never scanned for spyware, but I've always used Norton Antivirus and kept it updated.

I'd greatly appreciate a respone to either or both questions.

Thanks in advance!

Jeff