PCI to SATA / IDE Card / eSATA

[Felix Miata]

On 2013-01-29 05:50 (GMT) Thufir Hawat composed:

> What exactly does this card do:

Just like it says, it provides 3 ports: 1 eSATA, 1 (internal/conventional) 
SATA, 1 (internal) PATA, for those who lack sufficiency of such ports on the 
motherboard and have an available expansion slot to install it in. I have 
several similar cards from Newegg that use SiL chips, all to provide me eSATA 
connectors for motherboards lacking them.

>      SATA host controller chip with 32-bit interfacing
>      Compliant with SATA 1.0 specification
>      Supports two independent SATA ports with data transfer rate up to
> 1.5Gb/s
>      Built-in 256 byer FIFO per port for fast read/write operations
>      Supports microsoft generic IDE operation and intel bus master DMA
> http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815283030

> I was looking at USB enclosures for hard drives and came across this
> adapter, which looks interesting.  However, do you need drivers for these
> sorts of cards?

You can see in the image it uses a VIA chip, so you can expect support either 
with a specific VIA module and/or the generic libata module provided with 
your kernel.

> I see that the comments for this, and some other products, that they
> might only work with Windows.

If it wasn't SATA 1.0 it might have been possible the specific VIA chip could 
have been too new for older kernels, or even for newer kernels if the chip it 
uses were particularly new and hadn't had support incorporated by the IDE 
team. At that price and SATA version, I doubt it's unsupported. OTOH, it 
might turn out to be a poor performer. You need to find out the specific VIA 
chip it uses and Google it and the card part number if you need to know in 
advance about any quirks it might have.
-- 
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