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Is there a reliable SATA PCI adapter card available

A

AlFrugal

Junior Member
I have a secondary PC which I use solely for backups and for emergency use when my primary PC is unavailable. The motherboard is about nine years old and has no SATA connectors. The HDD has a failing controller and needs to be replaced. I'd like to replace it with a SATA HDD (which I could also use in my primary PC in an emergency).

I've read customer reviews of the no-name SATA PCI cards available on Newegg. There are lots of reports of unreliability (not only in RAID mode). Cards based on the SIL3114 chip get bad reviews. Promise made a SATA150 TX2 Plus card. I'd have confidence in this card. It is no longer available from retailers. It is available "new" on EBay, but I don't trust the sellers I've seen.

This secondary PC is very satisfactory for my purposes. It just needs a new HDD.

Is there a reliable SATA PCI card still available?
 
Does your secondary PC have a free PCIe slot? You'll find a lot more selection, and PCIe does SATA2 and SATA3, so you can get a faster hard drive.

I had the Promise controller for years and never had a problem. Did you check the classifieds here on the forum? The sellers should be more trustworthy than your average eBay vendor.
 
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"HDD has a failing controller" ??????

If it's the HDD, then just replace it with a suitable IDE HDD. There are many to chose from on Craigs List.

If you decide to try PCI, be sure to buy something that will allow the PC to boot from it (not all PCI SATA cards may support such capability).
 
Jkauff: My secondary PC predates PCIe. Thanks for pointing out the AT classifieds.

C1: If I buy a new HDD I'd want SATA. I'd be inclined to purchase a used HDD only from someone I know, but it didn't occur to me that HDD's are available on Craigslist.

Here's some detail about the failing HDD controller. I run Linux. For maybe a year, when I boot, I get messages saying "invalid CHS sector 0". Linux error recovery progressively ratchets down the configured disk speed from UDMA100 -> UDMA66 -> UDMA33 -> PIO4 during initialization. The gnome-disk-utility benchmark reports that my disk is too slow to benchmark. Just this past week, S.M.A.R.T. began reporting the HDD temperature as a constant 92 degrees C, even right after bootup. (Confirmed on each of my two Linux distros). Up until then the temperature report had been reasonable. The HDD was cool to the touch after shutdown, so the report is faulty.
 
I bought the PCI one from monoprice for $12. It has run for a year almost 24/7, and I had no issues at all. This was on windows server 2008 R2. I recently upgraded from 775 to 1155, and now I don't have any PCI slots, so I ordered the PCIe version and expect no issues with that one either.
 
Once in a blue moon I would encounter an issue that sounds almost like the exact same symptoms except I was using some variant of MS Windows (probably 98 or XP). CHKDSK would report a file allocation table size mismatch based on the files scanned (or seen) on the drive, so there was a CHKDSK error reported. The drive access was also very slow or bogged down. Running CHKDSK with the repair option enabled fixed the issue (ie, realigned the FAT with the files sizes seen on the drive via scan.

There is a possibility then that you just have some damaged/broken or corrupted files. The procedure, as usual, is to back up the drive and attempt a repair. If this problem reoccurs frequently then you may have some malware or an HDD going bad (ie, losing sectors with the drive remapping).

As for buying an HDD, just look for some of those old 300GB IDE Maxtor Diamond drives. Effectively they are enterprise quality and run forever.

If you are going to try PCI => SATA, then look at Newegg and study the user review ratings and their comments (pros, cons and other remarks). This whole idea could be lots more expensive if you should buy all the hardware and end up with some snag which results in being unable to boot from the conversion controller card (eg, something about your BIOS willing to recognize PCI/SATA during POST, then boot). IDE systems were crappy that way. For example, try booting with ONLY a drive on the secondary IDE controller (and primary controller disabled or with nothing hooked to it).
 
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AlFrugal said:
I've read customer reviews of the no-name SATA PCI cards available on Newegg. There are lots of reports of unreliability (not only in RAID mode). Cards based on the SIL3114 chip get bad reviews. Promise made a SATA150 TX2 Plus card. I'd have confidence in this card. It is no longer available from retailers. It is available "new" on EBay, but I don't trust the sellers I've seen.
That Promise controller has a BIOS that can't handle HDDs larger than 1TB or most optical drives.

The SIL3114 and its similar SIL3112 and SIL3512 chips, all from Silicon Image, are actually better choices, as is the VIA VT6421A chip. Most people prefer Silicon Image.
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