Hi.

Probably aimed at Mark for obvious reasons, but put here in case it helps others.

I'm looking for advice on PCI Sata add-in cards, ie which to get/avoid. I have two different requirements:

One is a high-performance, bootable, 3Gb sata card for upgrading an older IDE based shuttle, running XP. My experiments with IDE to Sata converters were somewhat unsatisfactory

The other is a multiport, not particulary high performance, but inexpensive and reliable card for adding more drives to a mini-itx linux server that lives in the shed on a long bit of cat5. It's quite slow anyway, so a fast card would be a waste of money in all probability.

I've checked with my normal PC part suppliers, and in pretty much all cases the cards are either more expensive than the drives and/or out of stock. I can get cards from ebay for very little money, but they all seem to be based on either the VIA VT6421A chipset or the Silicon Image Si3114A chipset. Both of these seem to be somewhat problematic, the VIA one seems to have three ports only one of which works in most cases, and the Silicon image one seems to be considered slow.

The mini-itx board does already have VIA sata controllers in it, one on the motherboard and one on a PCI card. And sure enough, the card has three ports, only one of which seems to work! The motherboard ports are happily running a RAID mirrored pair of drives, but I need to add another drive, which needs two ports working on the single PCI card available.

The shuttle is a bit of a pain, I really want to keep the gigabit networking in it which means both card slots are full, but I couldn't get the ide to sata adaptors running fast enough to be useful. So it's going to need a PCI sata adaptor. 100Mbit ethernet will have to do.

Any useful advice?

pca

Probably a silly idea, but how about one of these

http://www.lindy.co.uk/1-port-gigabit-lan-2-port-sata-combo-card-low-profile-option-pci/70571.html

It may be a long shot, but I have a Tempo SATA X4i that I wouldn't mind parting with. Despite being a PCI-X card, it says all over the box it will work in PCI-X and PCI slots. I guess the unused pins would just hang off the back of a PCI slot? The chipset is a Marvell 88SX.

I paid quite a bit for this a while back, but I would be willing to take a hit on it as I no longer have a need for it.

Keep in mind a SATA controller in a PCI slot (32 bit 33mhz) is limited to 133MB. Probably not a huge concern for a spindle based drive, but certainly lower then the max of 3gb (375MB/s) and a concern for SSD use.

I have a couple of these 2-port SiI-3512 boards in constant use here now (yes, two ports, not three).

They're cheap (DealExtreme!), bootable, PCI, and fast enough for my needs. I forget whether they're 1.5gb/sec or 3.0gb/sec (probably the former), but only SSDs are faster than 1.5gb/sec today (and PCI slots aren't even that fast).

Highly recommended.. BUT..

Upgrade the firmware on them before using. The Silicon Image website has much better/newer firmware. Without it, these boards are rubbish.

If you need exact details/instructions on the firmware update, let me know and I'll make it easy for you.

I've also got a 4-port version of this from DealExtreme, which works fine too. After the firmware upgrade, of course.

Cheers

I wrote the Linux drivers for those boards (and others with Marvell non-AHCI SATA chips). Lots of good features and performance.

The Tempo boards were originally targeted at Mac users, thus the high prices.

Cheers

Much like Bitt, my first stop for anything like this is Newegg. Their search is great. I'm seeing 11 cards that match your 3Gbps PCI requirements.

And if you're not able to order from them, at least you now have a product that you can chase down with a UK retailer.

Again.. 3gb/sec is useless when constricted by a 1gb/sec PCI bus.

Hey, I know the limitations, I'm just giving the man what he asked for! And if he wants to go the cheaper route, Newegg has dozens of the slower variety of cards. I don't know about the UK, but you can get SATA150 cards on Newegg for about $14.