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New motherboard with 4 SATA ports, or SATA card?

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tom10167

Member
Joined
Oct 9, 2003
Location
Phoenix. YOUR HAIR IS GOOD TO EAT
Trust me, it isn't as crazy as it sounds. My 200GB hard drive is filling up, and I need more room, it's a SATA, and so is my Raptor, so that's both my SATA channels.

I REFUSE TO BUY ANOTHER IDE DEVICE. So that really leaves me with the obvious choice of getting a SATA card, I would like it to have 4 channels, and I'm pretty sure it will come to that, but I suppose two would suffice.

Now, I'm not the avid performance fiend that some of you all are. I enjoy my 2500+, 1GB of ram, 9700pro, and RAPTOR, and always like more performance, but a 5% increase in speed in one aspect is not something that I desperately need, nor is it something I am willing to spend large sums of money on.

Now I was looking at SATA cards at zzf.

A lot of them were from companies I have never heard of before. Kingwin? LSI? Highpoint? I know Promise, but that's about it.

The cards range from $30, to $330. The high end ones seem very fancy though. I wouldn't need anything more than the SATA ports and possibly a RAID1 option.


Now I am an extreme minimalist, and I hate adding extra stuff in to my computer unless absolutely necessary. This includes hardware, especially expansion cards.

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=130455

Now I see this card, it's $75,

Then I see this motherboard, and it's only $40 more.

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=246458

I don't need a new motherboard, but this supports RAID 1, and the card didn't.

I'm really just lost and confused, suggest stuff to me please. :(
 
Oh how marketing gets us eh. If you are going to use RAID 1, I would get the mobo. But it sounds like space is an issue here, so maybe RAID 1 is inefficient for you? Promise is a good controller too.

You can try to sell your mobo for $40 to make up the cost difference.
 
I would get the SATA card, I have one in my system and it's been running my Raptor for awhile now with zero problems. You should be able to get one for less than $30, though I can't remember exactly how much I paid for mine. It's a pretty simple device and I wouldn't say it's worth the hassle of a motherboard upgrade.
 
If he has filled up a 200GB drive, I would guess that those are probably pretty important files (Pictures? Videos? Music?), thus the reliability of raid1 could be usefull to him.
 
It's not super-duper important, because I really don't worry about hard drive failure, and it gets expensive, but it's a nice feature. I guess that's up to ME to decide.

I think I did one of those crappy time-waster threads. I'm sorry everyone. :(
 
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