Picking a SATA card

[AstroManLuca]

I'm pretty sure my motherboard's SATA ports are acting up. I want to see if getting a new SATA controller will fix my problems before I take the more drastic and expensive step of replacing my hard drives.

Problem is, all the SATA cards on NewEgg have pretty poor reviews. They all seem to be cheap and sketchy, with poor driver support. How should I pick out a card? Anyone have experience with SATA cards?

 

[tweakboy]

Get a cheap one for like 20 bucks. No need to spend high money if its same specs.. good luck,,, anyone got any names? Intel would be good, OCZ Antec if they even make SATA cards. good luck,, gg and gb

 

[FishAk]

Asus makes a SATA III card, with two USB 3 ports to boot, for about $35. Trouble, is that it uses the Jmicron controller, so it's not as fast as you would expect for trying to be SATA III. Still, it's not too expensive, and if you only have one or two drives, I doubt you could saturate it with spinners.

OK, it's the U3S6, and it's $25. There was some discussion about it, and it's poor performance with SSds on this very forum. Again, if you are only using 1 or 2 spinners, it may be OK for you.

 

[Cerb]

Get a plain Silicon Image card, that the pics show the whole chip of (so that you can read its model once you get it), or where it is noted in the reviews. Syba, Rosewill, etc.. Make a note of the chip, while it's outside of the case (unless you absolutely know what model it is before you buy, of course).

See if Windows Update can find a driver. But, if it can't, head over to SI's site (not the card brand's site), and try one of their drivers for the chip. Much like a NIC, mobo, or video card, don't bother with anything on the driver disc that they come with.

If you plan to use optical drives on it, also get a non-RAID firmware and flash the thing, after you get it running, since stock non-RAID ones are rare, now (base, I think they call it). If you are running XP, the driver should come with an integrated flash dialog.

 

[Soulkeeper]

my Silicon Image card is pretty good

Most the bad reviews from newegg are likely related to raid and/or windows problems.If you just want a simple conversion card problems will be much less.