Recommendations for a Good PCI SATA card with an eSATA port

[Operandi]

I'm looking to run an external HD I have off of eSATA vs. the USB 2.0 I'm using now but the SATA ports on my board and current add-in card don't support hot-plugging. So I'm in the market for a new card with 1 internal and 1 eSATA port, recommendations?

 

[Arcanedeath]

Cards w/ an SI chipset like neweggs rosewill sata cards seem to work fine and tend to be fairly cheap so might be worth looking into.

 

[Operandi]

I should probably state that my main system drive will also have to be on this card. For whatever reason I am unable to boot with the main HD on my native SATA ports when a SATA add-in card is present.

I was looking at the Rosewill stuff but the low price had me a bit suspicious of corners being cut somewhere. Is there a noticeable performance difference between various cards and chipsets?

 

[jkresh]

a lot of the cheaper cards (especially ones with 2 esata and 2 sata) actually can only run 2 drives (and they have jumpers to switch between sata and esata) so you have to be careful about those.

 

[Operandi]

Originally posted by: jkresh
a lot of the cheaper cards (especially ones with 2 esata and 2 sata) actually can only run 2 drives (and they have jumpers to switch between sata and esata) so you have to be careful about those.

Yeah, I think I saw some of those.

I was looking mostly at 1+1 cards since thats all I need and will likely be one of the last pieces of hardware to go inside this machine before build up a new machine.

Still looking for specific recommendations...

 

[Old Hippie]

I have a HighPoint and a Rosewill card in that configuration. I don't believe there's much, if any, difference. I believe all the newer models (SATA2) support hot swap. Most, if not all, advertise the fact if they do.
Just buy the cheapest one.

 

[Zepper]

I'm using the Rosewill RC-210 and if works fine for me. I'm booting from it too - have to because the internal ports can't negotiate interface speed and I have one of those Hitachi drives that default to SATA 300 and play dead on a non-negotiating card... Only one low report card on it so far.

.bh.

 

[Operandi]

Ok, I'll keep the Rosewill cards in mind then.