Using SATA on non_SATA mother board

[jackalnomad]

Hello
im using 845glly mother board. it doesnt have sata port. i want to buy a high capacity Hard Disk. SATA is low priced and future safe. but if i want to connect it to my mother board i have to buy either IDE to SATA converter or PCI to SATA converter. which is better option IDE->SATA or PCI->SATA

 

[treefrog07]

You may want to look at these - they give you 2 SATA through a PCI card. I've never used cards like these, but there are some reviews.

 

[steve9207]

jack... I've added a SATA drive to an old PC that only had IDE connections and went with a PCI card like treefrog linked to (it was around $10 - $15). It worked just fine for me, although I can't comment in terms of performance (i.e., will it be as fast as connecting directly to a MoBo w/SATA ports built in), because I never got around to actually doing any tests before I built a new PC & took the drive out.

Steve

 

[sminlal]

I went with a PCI-to-SATA card and was very satisfied with the results.

 

[Paperdoc]

Some posters here in other threads have said the simple IDE-to SATA adapter modules are sometimes OK but sometime unreliable. Most who have used a proper SATA controller as an add-on card in a PCI slot find they work well.

There is one small issue which may not matter to you, but that depends on your plans. Using a PCI-slot SATA controller card and then trying to use the SATA disk as a BOOT disk does not always work. Using the SATA disk for just data is fine - no problem. But a mobo like yours does not have a set of code in its BIOS that allows booting from a SATA device it does not have. SOME such boards, however, had a BIOS feature that allows it to "add on" some BIOS code contained in an add-on card in the PCI slots. In those cases IF you have a BIOS with this capability AND IF the SATA controller card you buy has the necessary BIOS extension to allow booting from a SATA drive attached to the card, you may be able to use the SATA drive as a boot device. But even without that, you most certainly CAN use it as a data storage device. You just need to have a bootable IDE (PATA) drive in the system, too.

 

[Pointertovoid]

Pardon?

The Mobo nor the Bios don't need to know what Sata is. They call it an "SCSI host" and ask this extension card to boot but have no other role.

Same reason why Lba-48 in the Bios, as well as Udma, is irrelevant with a Pci host.

What you do need is that the Pci card is bootable, which is normally the case.

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One drawback of a Pci card is that it needs extra time to detect drives. For instance 8s in the case of a Pata/133 SiI0680a.

 

[Paperdoc]

Knowing what SATA is, is not the issue. My point was that, for an add-on HDD controller of whatever disk persuasion to allow you to BOOT from one of the drives attached to it, you need two things. One most certainly is the BIOS code extensions that give the mobo BIOS the ability to deal with those drives and the card in such a way that the OS sees no distinction and treats the drives just like any other, and I understand many such cards have that. The other is that the mobo BIOS must have been designed in the first place to use such code extensions present on PCI cards, and a few mobos do not. But even if this fails so that you cannot BOOT from a HDD attached to the controller card in a PCI slot, you will always be able to use those HDD's as data storage devices because any drivers necessary can be installed in the OS to be loaded automatically from the actual boot drive.