PCI SATA controller cards

[Daniel Prince]

I want to buy a PCI SATA controller card so that I can use a
two-terabyte SATA hard drive in my old computer. Are there any
brands I should seek out or avoid? Are there any chipsets I should
seek out or avoid?

So far all the ones I have found on eBay have a VIA chipset or they
do not list the chipset. Is the VIA chipset good for PCI SATA
controller cards? I know that VIA chipset USB controller cards are
supposed to not be very good.

Thank you in advance for all replies.

 

[Paul]

I want to buy a PCI SATA controller card so that I can use a
two-terabyte SATA hard drive in my old computer. Are there any
brands I should seek out or avoid? Are there any chipsets I should
seek out or avoid?

So far all the ones I have found on eBay have a VIA chipset or they
do not list the chipset. Is the VIA chipset good for PCI SATA
controller cards? I know that VIA chipset USB controller cards are
supposed to not be very good.

Thank you in advance for all replies.

I don't really understand why there is so little interest in making
the PCI SATA cards any more. The SIL3112 and SIL3114 are examples
of other chips that do the job. Maybe the profit margin just
isn't big enough to attract more interest.

With SIL3112, there was a bug in the boot prom, that causes a
hang if a 1TB SATA drive is connected. As long as the card
is re-flashable, that can be corrected with a firmware update.
The SiliconImage.com web site carries the latest firmware.

http://www.siliconimage.com/support/searchresults.aspx?pid=63&cat=15&ctid=2&

With VIA, you might have to insert the "Force150" jumper on the
drive, to get the drive recognized. With one exception, VIA
chips have a negotiation bug, that prevents SATA 300 drives
from working out that they should downshift to 150. By using
the Force150 jumper, you can bypass that bug. My Asrock
motherboard with the VT8237S, is one of the few VIA chips
where they actually fixed that problem and the VT8237S worked
flawlessly for me, with SATA drives. If you're going with the
VIA PCI card, make sure the drive you buy, has a jumper area
on the back. The Seagate drives I use here, have four pins,
and two of those pins are used for "Force150". "Force150" makes
no appreciable difference to performance (I've tried it both
ways and if you blindfolded me, I couldn't tell you whether the
jumper was in or out).

Paul

 

[Daniel Prince]

I don't really understand why there is so little interest in making
the PCI SATA cards any more. The SIL3112 and SIL3114 are examples
of other chips that do the job. Maybe the profit margin just
isn't big enough to attract more interest.

With SIL3112, there was a bug in the boot prom, that causes a
hang if a 1TB SATA drive is connected. As long as the card
is re-flashable, that can be corrected with a firmware update.
The SiliconImage.com web site carries the latest firmware.

http://www.siliconimage.com/support/searchresults.aspx?pid=63&cat=15&ctid=2&

With VIA, you might have to insert the "Force150" jumper on the
drive, to get the drive recognized. With one exception, VIA
chips have a negotiation bug, that prevents SATA 300 drives
from working out that they should downshift to 150. By using
the Force150 jumper, you can bypass that bug. My Asrock
motherboard with the VT8237S, is one of the few VIA chips
where they actually fixed that problem and the VT8237S worked
flawlessly for me, with SATA drives. If you're going with the
VIA PCI card, make sure the drive you buy, has a jumper area
on the back. The Seagate drives I use here, have four pins,
and two of those pins are used for "Force150". "Force150" makes
no appreciable difference to performance (I've tried it both
ways and if you blindfolded me, I couldn't tell you whether the
jumper was in or out).

Paul

Do you know if Western Digital and Hitachi two terabyte drives have
"Force150" jumpers?

I have found some Promise Technology cards. Are they better than
the VIA? One uses the Promise Technology PDC20376 interface chip.

I have also found some Silicon Image cards. Are they better than
the Via and Promise Technology cards?

 

[Paul]

Do you know if Western Digital and Hitachi two terabyte drives have
"Force150" jumpers?

I have found some Promise Technology cards. Are they better than
the VIA? One uses the Promise Technology PDC20376 interface chip.

I have also found some Silicon Image cards. Are they better than
the Via and Promise Technology cards?

The Hitachi drives I've looked at in the past, didn't have jumpers.
Hitachi expects you to connect the drive to a SATA II capable
controller, and then use their Feature Tool to make changes.
What I can't tell you, is whether a Hitachi SATA II drive ships
running at 150 or 300 by default. Since the drives are
supposed to auto-negotiate, logically it should ship at 300.

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/downloads/FTool_User_Guide_215.pdf

You really need to look at pictures of the product, to see whether
it has jumpers or not.

This Hitachi HDS722020ALA330 has a two pin block on the back of the
drive, but it isn't documented anywhere. Not even in the 260 page
technical spec on the Hitachi web site. Why write a 260 page spec,
including a picture showing the pins, and not say a word about them ?

http://images17.newegg.com/is/image/newegg/22-145-298-Z03?$S640W$

http://www.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/products/Deskstar_7K2000

On this Western Digital, you can see room for four jumpers.

http://images17.newegg.com/is/image/newegg/22-136-456-Z08?$S640W$

This is the Western Digital jumper info. The four positions include
a position for Force150 and a position for Spread Spectrum. Spread
Spectrum caused problems for early Macintosh computers with SATA.
You shouldn't need Spread Spectrum (either on or off) for other
PC type hardware. Spread Spectrum technology is used to spread
radio frequency emissions, to fool the FCC. If you take an SS item
into an anechoic chamber and sweep out to 10GHz or whatever the top
frequency is now, the SS helps the emissions stay below the max
allowable line on the graph. Chances are, Spread Spectrum is already
enabled on the drive, and if a Spread Spectrum jumper is present,
it is there to allow the feature to be disabled.

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=3698&p_created=#jumper

*******

One other thing you should be aware of, is "Advanced Format" drives.
Up until recently, all hard drives you could buy at retail, used
512 byte sectors. But a new kind of drive has been defined, where
the sectors are 4096 bytes. One purpose of this, is to help breach
the 2TB storage barrier. The only popular OS which is not happy with
this development, is WinXP. Some of the newer OSes have provisions
for dealing efficiently with the issue.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3691

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/18115

As far as I'm concerned, this technology should only be used on drives
that need it. Like drives over 2TB. To introduce this and force it on
all hard drives, regardless of size, is stupid. And yet that is the
long term plan. There was another article (which I didn't bookmark),
which mentions that the entire industry plans to transition to the
4KB format.

Paul

 

[larry moe 'n curly]

I want to buy a PCI SATA controller card so that I can use a
two-terabyte SATA hard drive in my old computer. Are there any
brands I should seek out or avoid? Are there any chipsets I should
seek out or avoid?

So far all the ones I have found on eBay have a VIA chipset or they
do not list the chipset. Is the VIA chipset good for PCI SATA
controller cards? I know that VIA chipset USB controller cards are
supposed to not be very good.


Do you know if Western Digital and Hitachi two terabyte drives have
"Force150" jumpers?

Western Digital and Seagate drives have Force 150 jumpers. For WD
drives they're the two pins in the column under "OPTI" (second-closest
to the SATA connectors):

https://www.westerndigital.com/en/library/other/2579-001037.pdf

For Seagate drives, they're the two pins farthest from the SATA
connectors:

http://www.seagate.com/images/support/en/us/cuda_sata_block.gif

Hitachi and Samsung drives have jumpers that don't do anything on
current models, so to set the 150Gbytes/sec speed limit you have to
run a utility program that writes stuff to the drive's flash BIOS
chip. Hitachi's program is called Feature Tool, while Samsung's is
EStool (not anything else, contrary to what Samsung wrongly claims).
Unfortunately these programs work only if your hardware is compatible
with 300Gbytes/sec drives, but some 150Gbytes/sec computers are --
none of mine, of course, except for some old Dell GX270 Optiplexes I
found in the trash. I probably have the same model Asrock mobo that
Paul does, only mine has the plain 8237 controller that hates
300Gbytes/sec HDs.