Installing a SATA controller and hard drive

[pengyou]

It would be helpful if you could make the answer to this a sticky. I have searched your site and found answers here and there but a lot of them are not completely self contained, i.d. refer to other posts or sites or make comments like "you need a third party driver", but never mention where. Can someone point me to a thread that will answer this question?

I have a 500 gb SATA II drive with a PCI express Serial ATA I/II Host Controller Card. The Mobo is a via p4pb 400 with a celeron 2.4 ghz - will soon have a 2.8 ghz P4 (I hope, but one thing at a time.)

I am really thankful to find this site. I still have some hardware that works only on 98. It works really well, so am not interested in shelling out more $$$ just to keep up with the Gates Also, I found that 98 is extremely stable once the evil, nasty IE 5 was removed! I will continue to explore your site!

Thanks again for all of your hard work.

Edited November 23, 2009 by pengyou

[Guest wsxedcrfv]

You'll have to tell us the exact SATA chipset that's on your PCIe controller card. Even with that, I'm thinking the odds are not good that you'll find a win-98 driver for it (because it's PCIe, not PCI).

You're better off getting a motherboard that has integrated SATA controller that has win-98 drivers. If you don't want to go that route, then pick up a cheap PCI SATA controller for $25 at your local mom-and-pop off-brand / discount / surplus computer-parts store (not the big-box stores).

I recently picked up such a card - it uses the Silicon Image 3512 chipset. Just FYI - SATA controllers will appear in your device manager as a "SCSI" controller once it's been installed.

[rloew]

It would be helpful if you could make the answer to this a sticky. I have searched your site and found answers here and there but a lot of them are not completely self contained, i.d. refer to other posts or sites or make comments like "you need a third party driver", but never mention where. Can someone point me to a thread that will answer this question?

I have a 500 gb SATA II drive with a PCI express Serial ATA I/II Host Controller Card. The Mobo is a via p4pb 400 with a celeron 2.4 ghz - will soon have a 2.8 ghz P4 (I hope, but one thing at a time.)

I am really thankful to find this site. I still have some hardware that works only on 98. It works really well, so am not interested in shelling out more $$$ just to keep up with the Gates Also, I found that 98 is extremely stable once the evil, nasty IE 5 was removed! I will continue to explore your site!

Thanks again for all of your hard work.

I have written a Patch and .INF file that support the JMicron PCI-E SATA Card using the standard Hard Disk Controller, so it is possible.

I cannot guarantee my Product would work with any other card, and I don't have a Demo Version for you to try.

Edited November 23, 2009 by rloew

[pengyou]

Thanks - my mistake. The name of the card is PCI express. It is still a standard pci card. i will check on the card and get back to you.

[osRe]

Are there any reliability or performance issues with PCI based SATA controllers on Win98? I'm considering going that route too for external backups.

[Queue]

I've had a PCI SATA card and 500 GB SATA drive for over a year (not as my primary Windows drive, just data storage) and it's worked flawlessly. The only tricky part is running scandisk on it as I have it partitioned as one massive 500 GB partition (sadly, Norton Utilities Disk Doctor won't work on that large of a partition); on the bright side, my computer doesn't freeze or restart arbitrarily, and I have a battery backup, so it's not like I even have to run scandisk anyway. It's a ''Silicon Image Sil 3512'' SATA card (it's RAID capable, but I don't do a RAID).

Queue

Edited February 4, 2010 by Queue

[triger49]

FWIW

I have 2 of those cards here.. The largest hard drive I have used is 320gb Sata.

The one from SYBA came with CD with drivers for a dozen or so cards.

The trick is, the drivers are listed by chipset, not card Manuf. But include

Raid/Non-Raid configurations.

For instance, the SYBA card uses INIC drivers. My Startech card uses Silicon-Image drivers.

They work incredibly well, and offer boot options as a SCSI device.

At any rate, if you can't find them easily....This CD may have them on it.

Jake

Edited February 4, 2010 by triger49

[Guest wsxedcrfv]

I've had a PCI SATA card and 500 GB SATA drive for over a year (not as my primary Windows drive, just data storage) and it's worked flawlessly. The only tricky part is running scandisk on it as I have it partitioned as one massive 500 GB partition (sadly, Norton Utilities Disk Doctor won't work on that large of a partition);

If you have a large hard drive and/or if you've got a FAT-32 volume with more than the usual 4 million clusters (perhaps a SATA or USB drive), Norton Disk Doctor and Norton Speed disk are compatible with volumes with up to 6.3 million clusters, but not more without using the command-line parameter /NOLBA. When using this parameter, the upper limit for NDD and SD is somewhere between 7.8 and 31 million clusters. The switch /NOLBA forces NDD and SD to skip the drive configuration check. This can also be done with a registry entry by adding a DWORD registry value named NOLBACHECK at this location:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Symantec\Norton Utilities

When this option is set to 1, Norton Disk Doctor and Speed Disk skip the drive configuration check.

[dencorso]

For more info, read this thread.