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re: Installing a SATA-II disk and a SATA PCI card Wednesday, June 24, 2009 at 5:14 pm Posted by bob wells (1591 messages posted) Post your question on this forum. http://www.computing.net/forum/hardware/1.html 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 > [Reply or follow-up to this message] re: Installing a SATA-II disk and a SATA PCI card Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 3:58 pm 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 > [Reply or follow-up to this message] re: Installing a SATA-II disk and a SATA PCI card Friday, June 26, 2009 at 10:20 pm Posted by Ed (659 messages posted) Happily, I do use Win98SE. And I've found that quite a large number of SATA-I PCI cards do come with Win98 drivers. But SATA-II disks usually need to be jumpered down to SATA-I speed, in order to function with SATA-I PCI cards. Many VIA chipsets for SATA-I cards are said to require the jumper, as they lack any auto-negotiation capability. And many SATA PCI cards are limited to supporting disks not exceeding 750GB. This is not a concern, since (at best) the updated WinME version of FDISK.EXE is limited to supporting disks not exceeding 512GB. Thanks very much for all your suggestions. Ed On Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 3:58 pm, Richard Harris wrote: >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. > > > [Reply or follow-up to this message] Tip: Use one of the [Reply or follow-up to this message] links above to add a message to this thread Search this forum Start a new thread on a different subject Report abuse of the forum Return to the Windows 98 Discussion Forum