SATA-300 adapter card for ASUS P4PE. Promise SATA300 TX4?

I am considering a SATA 300 adapter card for a SATA-300 drive instead of
attaching it to the motherboard directly in order to use it to the max,
if in fact, it would operate that quickly (but at some time in the
future it will probably be in a system that will use it at its maximum
capability)

Does anyone know of any issues with the Promise SATA300 TX4? Any
experience with the Promise or any other add-in card that does or does
not work with this mb?

Thanks
Ken K

 

You have that backwards. It will be slower.

Which likely has PCIe, not PCI-X or PCI66.

 

Folkert Rienstra said the following on 12/21/2006 9:43 AM:

Interesting. I am all ears... I would love to know why. I think my
ASUS P4PE mb only uses the SATA I (150?) standard on the Promise
on-board controller while the add-in card uses the 300 standard.

Thanks
Ken

 

No wonder you're so ugly...

Essentially because the card is limited by the bandwidth available
to a card which is normally less than is available to the onboard ports.

Its very unlikely that the drives can do better than the SATA 1 standard thruput wise.

Thats normally limited by the drive physical
characteristics, sectors per track and RPM etc.

 

I hope your only speaking if the standard PCI spec, and not of PCIX or PCIe,
both of which can handle a ton more bandwidth. Not to mention having up to a
Gb of cache with a dedicated I/O processor onboard the card. Not that the
Promise solutions offer any of these caveats, they are the very low end of
the market for addon drive cards.

 

Not than what is available to the onboard ports.

Irrelevant in most normal use. Thruput is
still normally limited by the card interface.

Pity he asked about one of those.

 

Basically the on-board ports can be connected in several fashions:

- PCI
- PCI-X or PXI-E in various speeds
- Something special

I have seen mixed solutions were some on-board controllers
are attached to PCI-X and some to PCI. In my experience
on-board controllers are allways faster or as fast as external
controllers in PCI. The TX4 however does 32bit/66MHz PCI-X.
If places in such a slot, the TX4 will be significantly faster
than in an ordinary PCI slot. The limit is still somewere
around 150...200MB/sec, i.e. 4 fast drives can saturate the
controller easily.

Arno

 

PCI in 2 speeds and 2 widths

and/or widths

As in: connected to the CPU Chipset internal bus

Which is in server boards.

Chipset included controllers, connected to the internal bus.

Standard PCI, as is his case.

PCI, not PCI-X.

Fully loaded, eg using RAID.

Which is about 2 future SATA300 drives worth.

But not by their own.

 

In that case they are equally fast/slow, using the standard 33MHz PCI bus.

 

Rod Speed said the following on 12/21/2006 10:25 PM:

I am open to looking at other solutions. Are there better controllers
that are not much more expensive? I should add that I am using this
computer for storage, so the drives on the controller card are used for
music and movies. I expect that within a year I will be upgrading to a
different board/cpu/memory system to take advantage of faster bus speed,
core 2 duo, etc (Vista?).

Thanks
Ken

 

The best 'solution' in your case is to use the onboard controllers.

Not better in the sense of being able to do anything about the
limitation to bandwidth you get with any card in that motherboard.

Then you dont need anything better than what the onboard controllers can do.

That will have even better onboard controllers.