SATA Card (PCI-E - Slow down video?)

[Necrosaro420]

I have 5 SATA devices, and debating on getting the evga 750i FTW motherboard, and it only has 4 sata ports. So im going to need another sata port from somewhere....

Does anyone have experience with sata cards? Do they work well, as well as just plugging the drive into the motherboard?

If one says raid on it, will it work with just a single drive w/o using raid?

Any performance hits?

Also, I noticed some connected to PCI-e.....will this slow down y our video card or anything while gaming?

Anyone have any suggestions for one? thanks

 

[iBPJohn]

You'll probably have to install a driver for it and I wouldn't recommend booting from it if you just get a basic one.

It should work with a just a single card without raid.

You should not see any performance hits on over all system performance with the card since I doubt you'd be saturating the PCI-E lanes.

 

[bnlitin]

Most of the PCIe based SATA cards are based on the Sil3132 chip. I am using one of these cards in my Asus P5Q Deluxe under Vista x64.
You install the card, and let Vista find the latest driver. It works fine, but is not as fast as ICH10R sata (it's just a tiny bit slower).
You can find these for $20 on newegg.

There is one pecular problem with SIl3132 based cards. The card's BIOS may not play nice with your system BIOS.
When I installed mine and tried to enable RAID, I got a funny "No enough memory" message.
This occurred only when I also enabled the Intel ICH10R RAID at the same time.
When I disabled RAID on the Sil3132 card, it worked fine.
I tried installing newer versions of card bios, but got the same problem.

I have used the PCIe SATA card with one or two drives - with and without RAID.
I did get the RAID-0 to work eventually but not with onboard ICH10R RAID also enabled at the same time.

However, I do have a work-around, I use RAID built-into Vista (you can make any two drives as RAID-0) without relying on the RAID feature of the card itself, and I also use the Intel RAID-5 on ICH10R.

 

[Necrosaro420]

Originally posted by: bnlitin
Most of the PCIe based SATA cards are based on the Sil3132 chip. I am using one of these cards in my Asus P5Q Deluxe under Vista x64.
You install the card, and let Vista find the latest driver. It works fine, but is not as fast as ICH10R sata (it's just a tiny bit slower).
You can find these for $20 on newegg.

There is one pecular problem with SIl3132 based cards. The card's BIOS may not play nice with your system BIOS.
When I installed mine and tried to enable RAID, I got a funny "No enough memory" message.
This occurred only when I also enabled the Intel ICH10R RAID at the same time.
When I disabled RAID on the Sil3132 card, it worked fine.
I tried installing newer versions of card bios, but got the same problem.

I have used the PCIe SATA card with one or two drives - with and without RAID.
I did get the RAID-0 to work eventually but not with onboard ICH10R RAID also enabled at the same time.

However, I do have a work-around, I use RAID built-into Vista (you can make any two drives as RAID-0) without relying on the RAID feature of the card itself, and I also use the Intel RAID-5 on ICH10R.

That is the same motherboard I think I am going to go with. Do you have a link to the specific card you have? thanks!