[tom10167]

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/Produc...uctCode=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/Produc...uctCode=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.

[Rumrunner]

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.

[fuzzba11]

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.

[aeiou]

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.

[tom10167]

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.