Cheap sata-controller addon pci card for old motherboard

[Santa Claus]

Hi, i have an old sparecomputer laying around, it has a small harddrive with xp installed and boots and runs fine so i want to put it to good use for backing up data and secondary storage for data i rarely use/need.
Its based on a nforce2(K7n2g-l) motherboard with a slighty overclocked amd32 T-bird 2400+ with 2x256mb ram and using builtin Gf4 graphics.
Would have 5 harddrives, one small for windows and a 30gb+160gb IDE but also 160gb+320gb SATA-II harddrives for a total capacity of 670Gb.

But the problem is the motherboard have no sata-ports so i need an addon controller for that, my needs are basicly just to access the sata-harddrives and raid/high performance is no requierment.
The data will be moved through a local area network at 100Mbps.
Its the first time im doing anything like this so wonder if its anything i need to think off or is it straight forward easy work?

Can i use any cheap modern pci-based sata-controllercard with this pci-slot?
• Five 32-bit PCI bus slots (support 3.3v/5v PCI bus interface)

These cheap sata-controllercard only has Sata-I and the harddrives have Sata-II, are seagate harddrives known to have issues with Sata-I controllers?

Which of these 3 cards do you recommend?
Wintech SAK-15 SATA PCI Controller Card
- PCI Controller Card for SATA Hard Disks
- VIA6421 chipset
- Driver CD & SATA Cable included
- for Win98/SE/ME/2000/XP
- 2 x internal ports
- 1 x external port

SUNIX PCI-kort, Serial ATA-150, 2xSATA-kontakter(int)
2 Serial ata-150 ports, supports both raid 0 and raid 1.

Sunsway/ST Lab PCI SATA 2P eSATA/SATA, SiL3512
Serial Ata-150.
2 external and 2 internal sata-ports, only 2 can be used at the same time.
Processor Silicon Image SiI3512

Regards

 

[RobCr]

Hi,
I have a similar question.
Could you provide details of your solution ?
Thanks,
Rob

 

[larrymoencurly]

The safest bet is probably a card based on a Silicon Image chip like the SiL3512/SiL3112 or SiL3114. They're cheap on Ebay ($3-6 gets you the same card sold elsewhere for $15-30), and Silicon Image provides drivers (maybe not for Win98 but definitely for all versions of Windows since 98SE and also Linux), RAID utilities, and BIOS upgrades (RAID and non-RAID).

Cards based on the VIA VT6421A chip seem to have trouble with newer drives that use 4KB physical sectors, and my 2TB Samsung HD204UI crawled at under 20MB/sec in Windows XP, even though the partition was aligned. This was also a problem with a Promise 20378 card, and Promise is supposed to be the best. Only the Silicon Image card handled that drive well. OTOH I got errors and very sluggish Windows XP when I used that Silicon Image card for one drive and the motherboard's SATA or PATA controller with another hard drive, but only for certain drives connected to it, including one WD10EADS but not another WD10EADS with a slightly different firmware version. This didn't happen when both drives were plugged into the Silicon Image card. OTOH my VIA VT6421A card handled that configuration fine with all drives tested.

Earlier VT6421 and VT6421A controllers didn't work at all with SATA II (actually SATA 300 megabytes/sec) drives, but the ones with chip version CD and dated 2009 recognized SATA 300 drives. The date code for the chip will be in the form yyww, where yy = the last two digits of the year and ww = the week of the year, i.e., 0948 means the year 2009, week 48. All Silicon Image and Promise chips have no problems with SATA 300, even though the PCI ones can't transfer at faster than SATA 150 speed.

 

[RobCr]

Thanks for response.
I recently received two 'Silicon' PCI boards with eSata(2 sockets) and Sata(2 sockets).
I bit the bullet tonight and installed it in my less important PC.
Both PCs are late 2003, and would not know Sata if it sat on one.
I have only experimented with the less important PC.
To make a long story short, this was all that I did -
(and some of them may not be necessary)
- Jumpered the Seagate Sata II drive, so it thinks it is Sata I
- Installed the PCI card (physcially shoved it into PCI slot)
- Stopped my boot up at the BIOS and enabled SCSI
(Could not find any mention of Raid, which I would have liked to turn off)
- I had my Seagate in one of those lovely external docks that you shove the drive into vertically. And it was connected via eSata cable.
When Win 7 had loaded, I went to Device manager, and pointed it to the driver in the small CD that came with it. I had to use the folder that was just called Windows.
It installed a Raid driver (I was hoping that I did not have to find out what a 'Raid' was).
It now all seems to work OK.
Seagate disc Wizard created an image for me in half the time that a USB cable takes.
The PCI card was this one -
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=170534548870&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT

OOPs I did buy the above, but not used yet.
THIS IS THE ONE I INSTALLED -
2 eSATA 2 SATA RAID to PCI Card Adapter Converter 3512
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=170563691864&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT

Thanks again for responding.
Rob.

 

[athlon1.2]

I had to stop using SIL controller in FreeNAS because it was casing massive issues with data corruption.

But then I have the same card in Linux w/o issue and I added a 2nd card with VIA chipset and again, no issues... I might have had to set the jumper on the drive to SATA-150-only, but that's it.

 

[sub.mesa]

I had to stop using SIL controller in FreeNAS because it was casing massive issues with data corruption.

But then I have the same card in Linux w/o issue and I added a 2nd card with VIA chipset and again, no issues... I might have had to set the jumper on the drive to SATA-150-only, but that's it.

You can use Silicon Image fakeRAID in FreeNAS as software RAID, but you should be very careful not to write to the last sector of the disk. Thus you should use partitions to prevent writing to the last sector. What's so special about this last sector? Well everytime you boot the controller reads and overwrites this sector; so that's where your corruption can come from.

Otherwise, the Silicon Image controllers are very well supported under BSD. Especially with the new siis driver. FreeNAS uses older MBR partitions though so may indeed give you trouble.

 

[larrymoencurly]

I recently received two 'Silicon' PCI boards with eSata(2 sockets) and Sata(2 sockets).

. . .

Jumpered the Seagate Sata II drive, so it thinks it is Sata I

That's not necessary with controllers based on Silicon Image, Promise/Marvell, or Intel chips because they were designed properly, unlike older VIA-based controllers.

 

[RobCr]

That's not necessary with controllers based on Silicon Image, Promise/Marvell, or Intel chips because they were designed properly, unlike older VIA-based controllers.

Had this page open in FF (bad habit of mine) to remind me to check for feedback.
Just tripped over it.
Thanks for the 'heads up', that is good to know.
Rob