Abit Serillel 2 advice please

Steve_h · 11 May 2006 at 22:14

Hope this is in the right forum?
Looking at the Abit Serillel 2 (HD-000-AB)
It says"With this simple device, you can upgrade your IDE hard drive so that it can be used on a Serial ATA connection. If using a Silicon Image SATA controller, you can also convert your optical drives to run on the SATA ports."

But when I click on the "Full spec" link to Abit things get a bit more involved.
Basiclly I want to know if I can use this on a Chaintech N force2 board because the Abit site says " Note: Compatible with SATA controller of Silicon Image on motherboard only!"
Could someone explain what they mean by silicon image? Do they mean the controller inbuilt on the board opposed to some sort of pci controller? :confused:

mosfet · 11 May 2006 at 23:34

Silicon image are the people that actually make the IDE->SATA and SATA->PCI controllers, they're an electronics firm like AMD/Intel etc.

The nForce 2 chipset doesn't natively support SATA drives, all nForce 2 motherboards with SATA ports have a controller, usually an SI 3112 chip, connected to the PCI bus, like a normal PCI card, but mounted straight to the motherboard.

AFAIK these things work with almost any SATA controller, and the advice is there so people buy more SI controllers, but just to make sure, check your motherboard manual to see how the SATA ports are implimented.

Steve_h · 12 May 2006 at 22:51

Only info I can see in my manual is that the SATA driver is on the original disk and is called "Promise FastTrak376".theres not a lot else except some info on setting up RAID

mosfet · 13 May 2006 at 00:50

Steve_h said:
Only info I can see in my manual is that the SATA driver is on the original disk and is called "Promise FastTrak376".theres not a lot else except some info on setting up RAID

FastTrak376 is your controller then.

'Promise', like Silicon Image, also make SATA controllers. If SI aren't lying, then you're out of luck.

Steve_h · 13 May 2006 at 21:12

Thanks for the info mosfet much appreciated.
I may buy it anyway as it's worth a try,if all else fails I'll just have to stick with the IDE cables.

Joe42 · 13 May 2006 at 21:36

Are you trying to get sata just because of the cables?

Depending on where your cables need to go, i've found sata cables can be worse than ide at times because they are difficult to bend. Might just be my rubbish cables, but i wouldn't bother getting sata for the cables unless your using a really small case with lots of disks.

Steve_h · 13 May 2006 at 22:09

Joe42 said:
Are you trying to get sata just because of the cables?

Yeah,what I want to do is buy a Pioneer DVR-111BK ReWriter as it has DVD-RAM capabilities but use SATA for the thinner cables and better air flow.
Unfortunately I don't know of a optical drive that can write to DVD-RAM and comes in SATA.