SATA PCI Cards?

[bigbeark]

I see there ar all kinds of PCI adapters that allow you to add SATA Harddrives to older motherboards not so equipped.

Most seem to be Chinese made, obtainable from HK or mainland.

Does anyone have any experiece with these? Are there SATA150 and SATA300types? Most seem to be based on a VIA chipset. Any good?

[toastygoodness]

Re: SATA PCI Cards?

yeah msot are based on via for normal pci. don't expect performance, just barebones. maybe an ide to sata would even be better.

[Deft]

Re: SATA PCI Cards?

@toastygoodness:
I think you meant SATA to IDE

[Per Hansson]

Re: SATA PCI Cards?

No point in SATA300
The PCI bus can only provide 133MB/sec performance, SATA1 is 143MB/sec and SATA2 is 286MB/sec

There are allot of such cards, some cheap crap and others decent by Promise, LSI and 3ware etc
Depends on how much you wanna spend...

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: SATA PCI Cards?

I have one of the "cheap crap" cards, a Silicon Image Sil3112a in my dual-PIII. Actually this chip was used on the first sata mobos as well, so don't complain... It does 90MB/s easily. Not anything to write home about, but certainly beats the crap out of IDE.

There's no point in spending hundreds of $$ for a Promise or anything.

[toastygoodness]

Re: SATA PCI Cards?

@toastygoodness:
I think you meant SATA to IDE

if you plug it in from the motherboard first, wouldn't it be ide to sata?

[toastygoodness]

Re: SATA PCI Cards?

I have one of the "cheap crap" cards, a Silicon Image Sil3112a in my dual-PIII. Actually this chip was used on the first sata mobos as well, so don't complain... It does 90MB/s easily. Not anything to write home about, but certainly beats the crap out of IDE.

There's no point in spending hundreds of $$ for a Promise or anything.

i don't recall silicon image being considered "cheap crap"

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: SATA PCI Cards?

i don't recall silicon image being considered "cheap crap"

Well i paid $30 for mine, about 3 years ago. Now it's closer to $15. Some people would call it cheap crap compared to the other names mentioned in this topic.

[Deft]

Re: SATA PCI Cards?

if you plug it in from the motherboard first, wouldn't it be ide to sata?

You're modifying the HD to go from Sata to IDE not the board :P

[stj]

Re: SATA PCI Cards?

stay away from "sil" series chips,
looking through the Linux kernal source a while back to see if a specific chip was supported, i saw all kinds of comments in the code about hardware bugs/issues on those chips!

[Junk Parts]

Re: SATA PCI Cards?

I played around with a PCI sata card and hard drive on this dell 4550 a few months ago. Never got anything good to happen. This may be because I didin't know what I was doing. I never could get it to accept the sata drive as a boot device so I gave up on it. The card and drive came out of a junk PC so there could have been problems there too.

[brethin]

Re: SATA PCI Cards?

I never use a PCI card but a mini card for each drive.

I have used these several times in various setups. They are not all that fast but alot faster than USB so if you have old IDE interface drives you want to add to a SATA interface and vice versa (they make them to work both ways) for say Jbod storage they work fine.

A PCI card would most likely be slower than a adapter card for each drive but cheaper.

[toastygoodness]

Re: SATA PCI Cards?

You're modifying the HD to go from Sata to IDE not the board :P

or you could be modifying the mobo to go from ide to sata....

the whole things circular reasoning lol. personally i use an sata cable instead of ide throughout the case because its more compact, but if you like to connect the adaptor at the back of the hard drive instead, be my guest.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: SATA PCI Cards?

stay away from "sil" series chips

They work just fine for me.

[stj]

Re: SATA PCI Cards?

hey junk, you couldnt get it to boot because the card had no bios - only a few 4port cards have a bootrom with them.

[severach]

Re: SATA PCI Cards?

I bought a Silicon Image and discovered that it was terrible so I bought VIA, Initio, and JMicron. JMicron was the only one that wasn't a total disaster. The rest have problems with hot plugging, hot plugging with the tray icon, boot and image incompatibility due to incorrect CHS values, failure to pass SMART data, failure to show up in the BIOS as a boot device, drive compatibility, and excessive error retry.

Now to find one that isn't super stingy on ports.

[bigbeark]

Re: SATA PCI Cards?

I foolishly assumed that anyone making these cards would make them BOOTABLE. Seems like a no-brainer to me. But apparently the VIA cards are non-bootable. The target audience is apparently people that use them to flash the BIOS in the XBOX-360.

So has anyone found any cards that are bootable?

[bgavin]

Re: SATA PCI Cards?

VIA = Junk

[PCBONEZ]

Re: SATA PCI Cards?

Are you using Windows or Linux?
Promise cards work in Windows.
I intentionally never tried VIA or SI.
For Linux I use 3Ware [which works in Windoze too] but those are all RAID cards.
.

[Spacedye69]

Re: SATA PCI Cards?

I have one of the "cheap crap" cards, a Silicon Image Sil3112a in my dual-PIII. Actually this chip was used on the first sata mobos as well, so don't complain... It does 90MB/s easily. Not anything to write home about, but certainly beats the crap out of IDE.

There's no point in spending hundreds of $$ for a Promise or anything.

I have one of those as well and have had no problems. I think I payed $12 for mine a couple of years ago.