Switching SATA HDD from mobo to PCI

[ATW]

I'm going to buy a Promise PCI to SATA card to switch my storage hard drive off the motherboard so my overclocks won't be limited. But before I do so, I want to make sure that this won't require reformatting of the disk or any other issues. Is it essentially a seamless transition?

 

[grohl]

Don't you think you should consider a mobo/chipset combo that locks the PCI bus? Even if you switch to a SATA PCI card it's still on the PCI BUS. Right? I guess I don't see why your solution would help things.

 

[ATW]

The PCI bus on Nforce3 is locked, it's the 1 & 2 serial ports that aren't. With the storage drive connected I'm limited to 205, without I've had it to 225.

 

[LTC8K6]

I think people would have noticed this limit to their overclock and we'd have heard about it before.

SATA doesn't really have a clock like the PCI bus clock anyway, does it? I thought the "clock" for SATA was transmitted along with the data.

I suspect your overclcock trouble lies elsewhere.

 

[ATW]

Originally posted by: LTC8K6
I think people would have noticed this limit to their overclock and we'd have heard about it before.

SATA doesn't really have a clock like the PCI bus clock anyway, does it? I thought the "clock" for SATA was transmitted along with the data.

I suspect your overclcock trouble lies elsewhere.

Just trust me, I've done my research on this. You haven't heard about it because not many people have 3 SATA hard drives on an Nforce3 chipset. Unfortunately I can't do research on swapping a drive from board to card because that information is hard to find, hence my asking here.

 

[LTC8K6]

I think you'll be okay moving the drive, but there seems to be little info about that out there. I don't think it's like RAID and different controllers.

Maybe you can find a PCI card that uses the same SATA controller chipset as your mobo?

I did find the bit about SATA and how it's clocked, though.

Serial ATA ? Embedded Clocking
Unlike the parallel ATA bus, Serial ATA does not have a separate signal dedicated as a strobe or clock. Instead the clock is ?embedded? in the data stream itself. When no data is being sent across the bus, a ?101010?? pattern is transmitted so that both devices may synchronize their internal receivers with the incoming bit transition timing. This synchronization is maintained during data transmissions. The 8b10b encoding enforces several bit transitions per 10 bits even during data transmission; clock drift is minimized by continuously tracking these transitions. Embedded clocking provides the timing benefits of source-synchronous clocking without introducing problems associated with clock skew.

 

[Cosmo3]

What motherboard do you have mine runs fine at 225 and above and I have a NF3 motherboard. My DFI board wil go higher with the SATA if you use ports 3 or 4. If your board only goes to 205 I doubt that the buss is locked. Give us the brand and model of motherboard.

 

[ATW]

I didn't realize such a simple question would turn into an argument. Anyway....

On the MSI K8N Neo Platinum, SATA 3&4 are run off the chipset, whereas 1&2 are run off a seperate Marvell chip, which is NOT locked. A 5mhz overclock will cause the disk(s) on 1&2 to go undetected and in most cases corrupt them. If you don't believe me, search the MSI tech forums yourself. As far as I know, this is the case with ALL NF3 boards, it's just not common knowledge because the number of people with 3 serial drives is very small.

Now back to the original question...will there be any issues with the board to card switch before I spend $40 to attempt it?

 

[Boonesmi]

if its not the boot drive, then you should have no problems moving it to a pci card

 

[kcbass]

I have a similar concern with my gigabyte ga-7vt600 1394 board...I'm using a SATA drive and have recently picked up a delayed write failure, and everyone I ask blames it on the crappy via SATA controller...considering picking up an adaptec serial ata host ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obi...ectronics&n=507846 ) to attempt to fix the problem. I've already RMA'd the drive once and don't want to have to do it again. If there's a better card out there, please let me know. I want this problem fixed. 

 

[kcbass]

i finally fixed mine...turned out it was a defective/crappy stata cable that was interfering with the clock pulse and screwing up the timing of my whole system. talk about weird....