SATA PCI - Add In Cards?

[DCB_AU]

Can you buy "Add In"- SATA PCI cards,- if you wanted to fit a SATA Hard Drive to a PATA Mainboard and how would the performance rate?

Also,would you fit the card to the FSB PCI slot. (In the manual it said that the second PCI slot is the FSB slot.

<font color=red>DCB</font color=red><font color=white>_</font color=white><font color=blue>AU</font color=blue>

 

[Crashman]

Hehe, ok, PCI runs at 133MB/s. We already have a UDMA133 standard. You gain nothing.

I don't know what your manual ment, it was probably written by someone who doesn't understand technology.

<font color=blue>Watts mean squat if you don't have quality!</font color=blue>

 

[Crashman]

Hehe, ok, PCI runs at 133MB/s. We already have a UDMA133 standard. You gain nothing.

I don't know what your manual ment, it was probably written by someone who doesn't understand technology.

<font color=blue>Watts mean squat if you don't have quality!</font color=blue>

 

[Spate]

The manual was probably written by someone who understand the PCI-bus of that particular mobo.

Usually you get best performance when the HD controller is installed in that recomended PCI-slot.

There are several good SATA PCI add-on cards available. These controllers will have about same performance as most onboard IDE-controllers, whether the onboard controller is SATA or traditional PATA. For a single disk or a two disk RAID 0 you dont need to worry about PCI bus limitations.

The current PCI SATA controllers are actually PATA 100/133 controllers with PATA to SATA converters. Therefore you will not get 150MB/s pr IDE channel no matter what. The only true 150MB/s SATA controller I know of is the Silicon Image chip onboard many of todays new motherboards. I have not seen this controller as a PCI card.

However, there is no way that one of todays IDE HD's can utilize as much as 150 MB/s, and SATA always use only one HD pr IDE channel. Roughly half of the bandwith from SATA is wasted I think.

If you have a 64 bit PCI slot in your mobo, you can use a 64 bit SATA controller with even better performance than onboard IDE. You need a large RAID to utilize this bandwidth though.

What you get with an SATA controller and SATA disks is basically a better cabling solution. No performance is lost or gained, whether you use onboard or PCI card controller, or compared to traditional PATA.

 

[Crashman]

Even if today's drives could use the "available" 150MB/s, the onboard controllers are also PCI devices. They sit in place of an omitted PCI slot. What I mean to say by this is that they are addressed as a PCI card, and the chipset to controller interface is still 32-bit, 33MHz; hence, they would still be capped at 133MB/s.

<font color=blue>Watts mean squat if you don't have quality!</font color=blue>

 

[Spate]

I know what you are talking about, and you are right (as usual ). I made my post mainly to fill in on the questions you left a little unclear.

About the PCI bandwidth you are mentioning, I think it's about time that 64-bit PCI are introduced to the mainstream mobos. Even if your HD's are not taking all of the 32-bit PCI bus, just add Gigabit Ethernet into the equation.

Therefore, my next mobo is going to be this one:
http://www.supermicro.com/PRODUCT/MotherBoards/E7505/X5DAL-TG2.htm

Total PCI bandwidth on this board should be about 10x compared to a normal 32-bit PCI mobo. It can use normal non-ECC DDR ram, and you can use an affordable Xeon 2.4 GHz 533 with hyperthreading! (cheap for hyperthreading, a little more expensive than normal P4 2.533GHz...). I'll go for a single CPU though.

As I see it, the only downside with this motherboard is the DDR266 support. And the price tag. But in many areas it is better than the upcoming Canterwood mobos, which will cost rather much as well. And it's available now.

With P4 800MHz FSB rumored to cost so much I don't see the benefits of Canterwood helping me this year. And I desperately need a new computer, preferably as soon as early May.

Hmm, straying from the topic? (I'm tired) Sorry for that, but the thread is in the mobo section isnt it? I would appreciate some comments on that SuperMicro mobo btw.

 

[Crashman]

Now that, sir, appears to be an awesome board! There are ways around the PCI bottleneck for chipsets that don't support higher speed PCI however:

If the device is on the chipset itself, you can make the bus any size you want. Modern chipsets are using high speed links of 533MB/s or more between bridges. So on-chip SATA 150 could be designed around the PCI bus, ie on it's own bus.

As for Gigabit lan, 1Gb/s is only 128MB/s, it still fits on a PCI bus.

<font color=blue>Watts mean squat if you don't have quality!</font color=blue>