integrated sata on mobo OR sata controller card . which is faster or same?

Question

i have an asus a7v333 mobo. and i was wondering if a sata card will run as fast as an integrated one on a mobo or is it slower or the same. hopefully the same cause im planning to buy a sata or sata II card for my mobo so its faster. will i notice any perfomace than with what the hd im using right now which is a WD ata100 40gb 7200rpm 2mb cache? thank you

im planning to get it today after i get some answers/opinion

and if all goes well what should i look for? rpm, cache, or transfer rate? i know all important just curious.. thanks again

seek time also i forgot to mention if its important

Answer 1

I am not 100% sure.

Lest start here.Most 32 bit PCI slots have a maximum theoretical transfer rate of 133MB's (I.E. the maximum theoretical transfer rate of IDE)

IF your motherboard's PCIslots run at 64 bits and your sata card can handle it then the maximum theoretical bandwidth is double, namely 266MB/s.

If you want true speed go for a drive that spins faster than 7200rpm like the WD Raptor. Otherwise get a raid card, 2 identical harddrives and set them up for striping.

At 133MB/s there will be little notible differenence in speed. Sata 1's performance gain is hardly noticeable at present. However if your motherboard uses a budget chipset then maybe it would be better to get a Sata card with a better chipset on. The sata card will still be slightly bottlenecked because your motherboard is using a budget chipset but things should be noticably faster still.

I benchmarked an 80 GB sata I drive on an budget SIS chipset, budget Via chipset, medium to highend Intel and a medium to highend Nforce 4 chipset. The sis and the via never got near 30 MB/s while the Nvidia and Intel scored 61 MB/s, under the stress test( it's all about the chipset).

I am no expert so there might be one or two technical mistakes above.

If you get a sata card, go for something with that uses an Uli chipset, if you can, otherwise anything will do fine.

As for harddrives 8 or 16 MB cache, 7200rpm(10000rpm is very expensive). Access time shouldn't be nore than 8.0 ns to 8.5ns (lower is better)

Answer 2

As far as sata controllers go, just stick to the onboard. Considering that your asus board is a pretty recent one, I'm pretty sure that it will be as fast as any controller you can buy. By sticking with the onboard controller, you reduce clutter inside the case and help with internal airflow and cooling. The only benefit that i can see to adding a card would be if you planned on using more than the two or three hard drives that the board supports. As far as hard drives go, first look at rpm's (nothing less than 7200rpm), then look at the buffer (8mb or more), then you would want to look at capacity. For a hundred bucks you can get a freaking huge hard drive that can be real fast. Just buy a name brand, the best two out there are seagate and western digital. Good Luck!

Answer 3

Do your SATA 3.0 drives have a jumper on the back that will limit them to SATA 1.5 mode? SATA 3.0 is backwards compatible. Not sure why it's freezing. Are you running the latest BIOS for that board?