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