SATA Question

Uncle Bob · July 26th, 2004, 04:30 PM

Would adding a SATA controller card and a WD Raptor 36gb HDD to my system
be equal to or near equal to a system with on board SATA? My MoBo is an
MSI 661 M-L SIS661. P4 3.06, 1.5 PC2700. The system is stable and reliable.
Why would I make such a change? Just because. No other reason.

sm8000 · July 26th, 2004, 09:50 PM

Bear in mind that with a card instead of onboard you're limiting your disk throughput to that of the PCI bus (133MB/s) instead of your chipset's much faster bus. Won't matter too much with only one drive though, as long as you don't have a lot of other heavy-duty PCI devices.

rpertusio · July 26th, 2004, 09:53 PM

On the other hand, a few motherboards hook the onboard SATA to the PCI bus anyway, so in reality it may be the same performance.

- rp

Uncle Bob · July 26th, 2004, 10:12 PM

Hmmmm. Sounds like I could just buy a faster IDE drive and put the saved money
towards faster ram and/or cpu. Thanks. I'm not ready to change my MOBO. I'll
convince myself I'm happy with what I got.