I have a 1TB Samsung SATA hard drive which I need to install in my old Dell Dimension 3000 (1995).
The Dell only has PCI interfaces (no PCI-Express). It is a Pentium 4, 800Mhz fsb model. The specification says that the PCI bus speed is 33Mhz. It only has an IDE interface as standard.
I would be grateful for any information/experience on the best PCI SATA controller cards for this machine which are Linux compatible
Many thanks in advance.
I can’t for the life of me find out how to edit this post, so I’ll have to post my edit as a reply.
Obviously, “1995” should read “2005”, otherwise, my PC would be a real antique!!!
Take a look at the last entry in the table:
HCL:IDE SATA - openSUSE
The VIA VT6421A is currently available at Amazon.co.uk for mere peanuts, e.g.
VIA VT6421A 3 PORT SATA SERIAL ATA + 1 ATA PCI CONTROLL: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics
SATA PCI - 3 int and 1 ext ports - VIA VT6421a: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics
The VIA VT6421A was at least was proven compatible with openSUSE 10.3 so as long as your Samsung drive has a means of restricting its speed to 1.5Gb/s (Seagate Barracudas have jumpers to select this) why not take the risk? At those prices I certainly would.
Terry.
My apologies for being so ill-mannered, and not responding to you, Bloggs_J. I don’t visit this forum often these days, and I have only just picked up the notification from an unused e-mail address, which I thought I had changed.
I finally found a SATA to IDE Motherdboard controller made by IOMAH, (also from Amazon) which seems to be working well so far.
My apologies once again, and thank you for taking the time to help me.
Hi. I did this in the past by adding a PCI 2 port and running a couple of SATA I hard drives on an old A7N8X mobo running about 2.4 GHz. This worked fine and I had no problems.
I have since upgraded the same computer so that it has one SATA 1 drive and 1 SATA II drive with a Silicom Images 31112 controller card - 4 port, runs SATA 1 and SATA 2 drives. I’m getting all kinds of unexplained lockups when I transfer data from one drive to the other drive - everything just locks up solid, the mouse stops working, and I need to turn off the machine and reboot to get it to run. Fortunately all my drives are formatted in ext4, and it has a very good recovery system. I have the drives both set to compatibility mode, too.
My suggestions are that you go to a newer motherboard, and/or that you ensure you don’t mix the types of SATA drives you have in your computer.