sata controller

[sherpadog]

have an ECS N2U-400 mobo.. fortunately, it doesnt support sata harddisks yet. my vendor said to me to get instead a pci sata controller so i could use/attach sata drives. will the sata drives connected to pci sata drive controllers cards have the same performance, speed, etc, with the sata drives connected to a motherboard with built in sata controllers? any ideas guys? thanks..

 

[lunitic]

yes.

well, actually, booting the system is slower, since the PCI controller must be initialized. The controller also takes a lot of time searching for drives (well at least mine does).

 

[jammydodger]

The SATA controllers on a lot of motherboards are often exactly the same as the ones offerred as add in PCI boards. Im currently using a SATA PCI add in card from EIO which is based on the silicon image (Sil3112A) chipset. If you go to the silicon image web site it says that the chipset can either be used for PCI cards or motherboards.
However this is a RAID controller not just an SATA controller.
I dont think there is any performance difference when using an add in card..perhaps a little more CPU utilisation but thats about it.


Why use windows when you can use doors?

 

[Crashman]

More CPU utilization for a card? I doubt it. The onboard chips are also using a PCI interface. Simple, they eliminate a PCI slot and run those traces to the SATA controller instead. So the only difference between onboard and the card is that the card is removable.

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