PCI SATA card vs on-board SATA

[Darknyt]

I have read that the SATA controller on my Abit NF7-S v1.2 used resources pulled from the PCI bus. Now doesnt sliding a SATA card into the PCI slot do the same thing?? Is on-board SATA better than having a PCI SATA controller? I can tell you for a fact that I cannot use the SATA controller on my NF7 because I want to RAID 0 my drives(To play games). The NF7 has data corruption problems when using the on-board RAID chip, so I went and bought a Pacific Digital Talon 4 port SATA PCI card to bypass this problem. Anyone have any thoughts on my question? Thanks

System

AMD XP Barton 2500+ @ 3200+ (via 400MHz FSB)
512 MB Mushkin Level 2 Black in dual channel mode
SCSI: NEC CDROM/Matshita CD-R/Generic CD-RW
Adaptec 2940UW Pro SCSI adapter
2 X WD Raptor 10,000 RPM HDD @ 74GB each
400 Watt Antec PS

[Peter M]

Depends.

Any onboard SATA coming from a separate chip will be on the absolute same PCI bus as cards you plug into the slots.

Integrated SATA, coming directly from the core chipset, is on a faster connection, separate from PCI.

[Darknyt]

Then how is Pacific Digital able to boast such claims on being faster than SCSI in some apps. when the Raptor drives are paired with the PD Talon SATA PCI card?

[Peter M]

Marketing bull. What do you expect from a company trying to sell stuff? "Look, over there, there's technology that runs circles around ours!", or what?

Seriously, today's SCSI controllers would be even more seriously choked by the measly 100 MB/s actual, aggregate throughput you get out of a desktop mainboard's measly 33 MHz 32-bit PCI bus.

There's a reason why workstation and server boards employ 100 to 133 MHz 64-bit PCI-X slots, usually on two or more separate busses. You just can't get serious I/O throughput from a desktop toy, sorry.