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PCI SATA card

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darkfoon

Member
A family member gave me a 400GB seagate harddrive for my birthday. I found out, unfortunately, that it uses SATA and none of my desktops have SATA (yes, they are that old).

Since I am a ways off from upgrading to anything that supports SATA, and I don't want to bog down the performance of the drive with an external closure (using USB or firewire), I am looking for a good PCI SATA adapter card.

I've read a bunch of the product reviews on NewEgg, and from what I've gathered, they all suck. Unless I want to pay 300 dollars for the adapter card (which I don't).

Linux support is something I like to have, since I dual boot on most of my computers, but if it's not possible, I can live without.

So I am asking for input from owners of adapter cards. Which ones are worth it? Should I wait until I can use a motherboard controller?

Thank you
 
Any of these motherboards with the Intel 865 chipset will bring your system into the sata world without giving up your other peripherals, and likely be cheaper and less frustrating than chasing the pci/sata controller route. You may also want to take a look at eBay for a newer board that uses sata but still has AGP.

Good Luck
 
Go to ebay if $12.11 is too much for your budget.

Seriously, these cards aren't tricky or extreme. One is about as good as the other...
It's less than $35 no matter which way you go.
 
Cheaper would be to get a SATA to IDE adapter, but those are slow. Any cheap PCI SATA card from dealextreme should work. Alot of the cheap cards might have 4 ports, 2 internal, 2 external, but in reality you can only choose one set (either the 2 internal, or 2 external). Just something to keep in mind.
 
Every PCI card IDE or SATA controller I've ever had has had problems and lead to data-corruption, delayed write fails and the like. Chipsets from Highpoint and Promise have been equally bad. Just bad luck on my part?
 
^Do you have write caching enabled? I think I read somewhere that certain cards have data corruption problems with write caching enabled.
 
Fortunately hard disks got big enough in recent years that I no longer need to use extra controller cards. I did have write caching enabled though - or at least I don't recall ever disabling it. Looking back that would've made more sense.
 
Ok, I'll keep in mind that write caching is something to disable on PCI SATA controllers. I never would have thought of that.
 
The problem with disabling write caching is that your drive performance will suffer. Not sure how much that matters to you. PCI itself isn't very fast, might want to look into a PCI-e card if you want better performance. Personally, I am looking for a PCI SATA card as well, but since it is for my Windows Home Server, performance isn't too crucial for me. This is the card I am considering, perhaps it would suit you as well:

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.4660
 
So far, it looks like the Silicon Image card from dealextreme or the Addonics card from newegg.
I'm going to keep looking around, if anybody has anything else to contribute, it's always appreciated.

EDIT: I've sort of given up on the idea of replacing the motherboard with one that has SATA on it because I'd be too tempted to simply build something expensive. I'll ask around and see if some friends have older hardware they are willing to part with, then it might become a viable option.


Thanks for all the input thus far.
 
Originally posted by: WildW
Every PCI card IDE or SATA controller I've ever had has had problems and lead to data-corruption, delayed write fails and the like. Chipsets from Highpoint and Promise have been equally bad. Just bad luck on my part?
Click to expand...

Sounds like it. My Ultra66 and Ultra100 cards had data-corruption problems, but the Ultra100/133 TX2 cards are solid.

Also, had decent luck with later-model Silicon Image (CMD) chipset cards. I've used these with success.

 
I was very happy with my promise sata150 card (4 ports non-raid)
linux support was excellent
I only used it for a few months with two 320GB wd drives, then I got a motherboard that had several sata ports on it
now it collects dust on a shelf (but still looks nice)

looks like newegg sales only the sata300 ones now, you might be able to find a sata150 at a deep discount somewhere
 
Originally posted by: WildW
Every PCI card IDE or SATA controller I've ever had has had problems and lead to data-corruption, delayed write fails and the like. Chipsets from Highpoint and Promise have been equally bad. Just bad luck on my part?
Click to expand...
Maybe. Over the years, I've used quite a few PCI controller cards (both IDE and SATA) and haven't seen any problems. The IDE RAID cards have been HighPoint and the SATA non-RAID cards have all had Silicon Image chipsets.
 
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