Okay, my motherboard apparently doesn't support the Raptor 150, so I was considering getting a SATA controller card. However, my question is what kind of performance hit am I going to take when using a controller card instead of an onboard sata controller? Thanks,
I don't think you'll see much of a performance hit with a PCI card, the bottleneck will probably be the drive.
Wait. Are you saying you already have SATA on your motherboard? If that's the case, you're wasting your money going with an external card just to run a drive off of it. If you were looking to run a RAID 5 array, I could see going with a 3rd party card. SATA I and SATA II conform to the same electrical and physical requirements of the Serial ATA standard. SATA II offers NCQ/TCQ support and a 3Gbps burst rate. However, this in no way means you cannot run a SATA II drive on a SATA I controller. A lower burst rate maximum is hardly going to make a difference in performance. You're talking about a peak transfer rate ceiling, not sustained. ATA drives (this includes SATA and SATA II) tend to reach about 40-50MBps, and SCSI can hit up to 80MBps.
My motherboard does have a SATA I controller built in, but apparently it doesn't work with any drives larger than 137GB... The board is a few years old. So, it doesn't work with the Raptor 150. Believe me I tried every possible way to get it working, but the BIOS flat wont recognize it. I did try the drive in another computer and it worked great so I know it's not the drive itself. So, I can either return the 150 and get a smaller raptor :x: or just buy an add on controller. If an add-on controller will give similar performance then I'd rather keep the 150; otherwise, back to the store. Thanks,
That's a limitation of your OS. A controller card will not get you around that. SATA I has the hardware capabilites around that, but Windows XP and 2000 need service pack updates before recognizing beyond 137GB. Windows XP before SP1 would only do 137GB. Windows 2000 needs SP4 to recognize of 137GB. You'll have to format the remaining space and have it as a separate drive or [google]Slipstream Windows XP 2000[/google] and install that version on your hard drive.
B, It can't get past POST, so it's not an OS issue the problem is strictly in the BIOS. The motherboard itself just doesn't support it; although it does support SATA drives with a smaller footprint. Thanks,
I have an Abit AS8 AS8 Overview - ABIT USA with: Intel 530J processor 4GB PQI Turbo RAM (CL2) 2 Maxtor IDE drives 1 IDE DVD Burner
I thought of one thing: check your SATA cable and power connector. While you're at it, make sure you're not plugging in both the SATA power and molex connector. Using both at the same time may cause problems. I don't know what BIOS version you have, but I did notice that Abit did a BIOS update a few releases back that address issues with SATA Optical drives. While I can't guarantee you anything, if your BIOS isn't the version 16 or later, you might want to flash it to that version (or later, as BIOS updates are cumulative) to see if that resolves anything.
