Sata Pci Card

[dod_gamer]

Ok, I have in my possesion a SATA pci 2 port card, and well I am wondering if it will work the same as if it was onboard and well how much better is say a regluar 7200 rpm SATA drive than an 7200 rpm ide, any help will be appreciated!

 

[ambientZ]

it will use different cables.

Now if your 7200 drive is old, the newer generation drives would be faster, but not because they are sata.

Also, since almost every sata drive has a pata brother, you dont really gain much.

If you bought a wd raptor (only available in SATA) youd think it was faster(but its 10k rpm).


If your onboard ide controller was only ata-33 or something, youd see a benefit, but even the fastest drives dont transfer at much over 60mb/sec, so even ata-66/100 is plenty. Sata runs at 150mbyte/sec, but no drive can do close to that.

 

[Met-AL]

A for wether it will work as well as if it were onboard instead of a PCI card, that depends.

If a onboard controller is connected thru the PCI bus there should be no difference, but if the onboard were to be connected to the southbridge directly, it would not suffer the same bandwidth limitations that the PCI controller will, not that those limitatons are going to effect 98% of users in a desktop gaming/workstation enviroment.

There is one large benefit using a card like you are: If you use it to set a raid stripe, you can move that stripe to a diferent PC if you need to. With a onboard solution, you can't unless the MB has the same controller....as far as I know. I lost 40GB of data on a RAID stripe, not because the stripe failed, but because the motherboard was damaged by a short circuit from the floppy drive. The motherboard was a few years old with a AMI raid, which no current boards have.