re: Installing a SATA-II disk and a SATA PCI card
Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Windows 98 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Richard Harris
(258 messages posted)
Non-RAID SATA add-in cards do exist. I have a Roswill RC-220, which works well under
XP. The trick to this card is moving a jumper from bootable to non-bootable, when
using it to drive non-system disks, that is, just data disks.
However, your biggest challenge will be to find an add-in card with drivers for Windows
98. I hope that you have 98SE, since there appears to be more support for that than
plain 98.
As far as the speed of SATA, that depends on more than just the controller and hard
drive. At some point the buss will be limiting. I have a circa 2003 motherboard
with a buss rated at 400 Mhz. Thus, although eSATA-I is theoretically about 4X faster
than USB2, I only see a factor of 2X. If I switched form SATA-I to SATA-II I would
expect no improvment, since I suspect that the SATA controller is not the bottle-neck
on my PC. Also, at some point the rotation speed of the hard drive will become limiting.
As another benchmark, I noticed that switching from ATA/100 disks (and controllers)
to (internal) SATA-I disks (and controllers) increased write speed by about 2X.
But, I also switched motherboards, from a 100 Mhz buss to a 400 Mhz buss, and with
a factor of 5 X in CPU speed. So, was the increas in speed due to SATA-I vs ATA
or other things?
A couple of words of caution on very large disks: (1) Are you sure than 98 can handle
them? (2) how about the controller on the PCI card? Besides reading the manufacture's
specifications, do a couple of searches on the card's name/number and words like
"problem" or "limit". Before I got my card I discovered that some SATA cards are
limited to under 1000Gig; otyhers can go to 1500 Gig.
Best wishes. You will like SATA (and eSATA), if you can get it to work.
On Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 9:29 am, Ed wrote:
>Can anyone recommend a PCI card to add to a Win9x system, that will provide at least
>one internal SATA port? My system uses PCI 2.2
>
>I'm trying to add a PCI card with 48-bit LBA, to support a new Western Digital SATA-II
>hard disk larger than 137GB.
>
>I'd prefer a PCI card with a Silicon Image chipset. I've heard VIA chipsets can
give
>problems with SATA (in regard to auto-negotiation between SATA-I and SATA-II), and
>that Silicon Image cards are therefore a better choice for adding SATA support.
Can
>anyone comment on this?
>
>I don't intend to use RAID, so I'd prefer a solution with minimum additional complications
>from that angle. Ideally, I'd prefer a PCI card that comes without RAID support
(though
>it seems to be ubiquitous if there are two or more SATA ports on the card).
>
>I'd be happy to settle for a card that has optional RAID (e.g. where the PCI card
>has the option to use a non-RAID BIOS).
>
>Are there any disadvantages to a SATA disk, compared to an IDE / PATA disk? This
>will be my first forray into SATA: I've previously only used IDE.
>
>Ed
>
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