sata pci cards

[Jayman]

I have 2 IDE HDs drives that ive had forever & am thinking of upgrading them but my mobo dosent have SATA sockets & ideally id like to go with SATA II drives for when I eventually upgrade my mobo. So the question is are these PCI to SATA cards any good or am I best off doing a massive upgrade now? Any advice will be very much appreciated

 

[squiffy]

No problem, no different to a PATA or SCSI card. Try and find non-raid, as they're cheaper, look for 2 ports ideally 4 ports as it gives you upgrade potential. Can't seem to find any suitable ones on the site (brothers looking into one also) has a Promise PATA controller in his machine too.

 

[rpstewart]

A PCI SATA card will be fine, doesn't even need to be SATA-II, the drives are backwards compatible, usually by way of a jumper on the drive.

I'd watch out for a couple of things though - check the card supports bootable disks otherwise you'll need to continue using your IDE drive for Windows. Also watch out if you decide to set up a RAID array on the card (if it supports it), if you upgrade to a new mobo then chances are you'll not be able to transfer the drives without backing everything up to DVD or another HDD as the mobo won't recognise an array created on the card.