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The Punisher · December 26th, 2003, 10:46 PM

ok heres the deal, i ordered an sata hd with the pci card needed and power adapter, Im currently using a 30gb maxtor regular eide 100, i plan on taking this drive out and putting it in another pc, but I don't know if I will be able to install an OS on the new SATA Drive since drivers won't be installed, how will this work, since I want to install a fresh copy.. you understand what im saying? My mobo doesn't have sata ports, thats why Im gettin the PCI controller card, but putting in a new hd and all with no os, how will this work, never done it before.

bailey · December 26th, 2003, 10:50 PM

I would not recommend your doing that,
you should look for a motherboard that will support sata boot devices

The Punisher · December 26th, 2003, 10:52 PM

too late, all the stuff has been shipped out, if I run into problems I will have to just get a regular hd, but I will see, if anyone has any input or suggestions/advice, you are welcome, Thanks.

Rand Dusing · December 26th, 2003, 11:15 PM

I'm pretty sure getting a SATA PCI card voids the speed increase void. For example, SATA is a speed of 100 and PCI is a speed of 50, so if you hook up SATA to a PCI it takes away that extra speed which what SATA is mainly used for. Notice the speeds are correct and made up but I'm pretty sure SATA on PCI isn't worth it.

The Punisher · December 27th, 2003, 02:32 AM

well if this was true in the way you are putting it, i would think that other pci components would slow down a system also, so yeah, I don't think classifying it as a "sata on pci" is right, to be honeest I think it will still perform the same with the card, anywayz, im just waiting til my product comes I will tell you guys how things go. Thanks for the input.

Jarhed7276 · December 27th, 2003, 02:46 AM

RD is correct . The only way to get the true performance of SATA is to have a chipset that supports it which at the moment means an i875 or i865 chipset. A SATA pci controller card will be limited by the pci bus.

VHockey86 · December 27th, 2003, 02:48 AM

Not to be picky but I think EIDE normally supports up to 133 (hard drives are either 100 or 133), and SATA I thought was 150 (hence the benefit, higher than IDE can go).

As for PCI im not really sure... but I think the bus speeds of pci slots are quite capable of supporting the speeds of a hard drive (I mean u can run a graphics card off PCI like the mx 440 (which although slow for a graphics card, it isnt THAT slow, especially by magnetic media standards))

Rand Dusing · December 27th, 2003, 02:50 AM

I was somewhat right, having SATA on PCI doesn't totally make it useless. Even most of todays boards have a SATA chip integrated and the new NF2 should have it. SO you won't need another integrated chip on your board. This should increase performance. I 'm about to get on of those Raptors for my SATA on my LANPArty nfII ultrA!

Jarhed7276 · December 27th, 2003, 04:04 AM

Here's a qoute from an article from Anandtech.

The next and quite possibly the most important feature of ICH5 is its integrated Serial ATA controller. Current Serial ATA controllers use a PCI interface to the South Bridge (or MCH) and thus eat into the 133MB/s of bandwidth that is allocated to the collection of all 32-bit 33MHz PCI slots on a motherboard. Well, if you look at the Serial ATA specification you'll notice that the maximum transfer rate is listed as 150MB/s, that's 13% more bandwidth than a 32-bit/33MHz PCI bus can provide! Whether or not drives are currently reaching even half of that maximum transfer rate isn't an issue, regardless of what the case is, you never want to create additional bottlenecks; by placing the Serial ATA controller off of the PCI bus, a bottleneck is created that would only be exposed down the road. Intel's ICH5 gets around this problem by bringing the Serial ATA controller onto the ICH and bypassing the PCI bus all together. The Serial ATA controller has a direct link to the Hub Link 2.0 interface in ICH5 and thus can offer a full 150MB/s per channel. ICH5 features two Serial ATA channels (supporting a maximum of two drives) and two Parallel ATA channels (supporting a maximum of four drives), all of which may be enabled and used concurrently.

Here's a link to the article Anandtech
The quote is on page 6.

bfcx · December 27th, 2003, 05:31 AM

To answer your question your PCI SATA controler should come with a disk that when the windows XP/2000 installation is starting up you hit F6 and then a bit later it'll ask you for the driver disk so then it will know how to talk to the SATA HD's. You even have to do this with the i875 as i have.