Big SATA w/NCQ + what controller?

[Tazman2]

Well i'm finally saying f*** it and ditching 3 of my ide drives and going 1 fast big SATA w/NCQ and possibly keeping my other SATA for storage as it currently handles. So going by some random info here and a certain review the Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 ST3400832AS 400GB drive is big, fast and not too expensive. Thoughts comments? Also what SATA card that supports NCQ as newegg has a few but is there any reason to get one versus another? Thanks!

 

[DougLite]

Is this drive going in your sig system? If so, I'd use the SATA ports on the board (the NVidia ones) and be done with it.

 

[Tazman2]

Yes. I don't think they support NCQ plus the onboard SATA controller/drivers are known to be ehhhh....

 

[DougLite]

The nForce4 SLI chipsets supports 300mbps transfer rates and NCQ. Also, it has much more bandwidth to work with, as the controller is attached directly to the MCP rather than connected to the PCI bus like a card you'd pick up from Newegg or the like. The performance is pretty good as well, and better than most low-priced SATA hosts out there. If you want to jump into the 3Ware level league, be prepared to throw down serious cash for a good SATA adapter, otherwise just stick to the NF4 ports.

Do NOT install the nForce ATA drivers unless you are running RAID. You may hose your optical drive support.

 

[Tazman2]

Seeing the review on anandtech they did use a gigabyte nf4 board and they got pretty good scores so i guess i'm going that way not to mention i realized i have no more PCI slots left anyways! My only worry is what drives do i install to install windows on the SATA drive AND also all the random info i found that shows that you MAY need to run a single drive RAID to get the drive to be recognized or something i dunno. Ugh!