Q: Which basic SATA Card is best? Budget: <$75

[Satyrist]

I was wondering what would work best in a standard 32-bit PCI slot, and will work fine in the latest Linux distros. I have read about all sorts of problems/flakiness with Silicon Image chipsets, so I figure I'll steer clear of them.

SATA 150's fine, it's primarily for use in a fileserver.

I'm not looking for RAID capability, either...Simply, just something that I can put 4 drives onto.

thx

 

[unhappy_mage]

Before I read all of your answer, I was actually going to recommend the SilImage chipsets. The only other in your price range is the Promise, and that's even worse from what I've heard. The sil is supported under Linux (and it's actually in the kernel, so it will work (shakes fist at Marvell)), but if you want to do raid of any sort, linux software raid will be far better than any of the in-driver raid setups out there.

 

[Satyrist]

But is it stable...I seem to recall the SILImage drivers having all sorts of reliability/corruption problems, at least when using Windows.

Do they work reasonably under Linux? I'm currently running a testrig using Ubuntu 5.10, That will likely be where I start.

 

[unhappy_mage]

As far as I recall, they're fine; my brother has a sil3112 onboard, and he had linux running a while ago. I don't remember any stability issues; he moved back to Windows to play games as fast as he could

Whatever you do, DON'T buy a marvell-based card. There's no in-kernel support, and so I've had to play games with tech support (very nice guy, but still...) to try to get it working. My strategy is now to wait until native in-kernel drivers come out.