VIA Sata+Ide Pci Card

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Category: Pc Hardware

Published on Wednesday, 25 September 2013 12:52

Written by Ben

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I got this card from a friend who just didn't need it , I didn't really need it either but I said thanks to the dude and grabbed it anyway.

This card is a drive expansion card with 3 SATA interfaces and one IDE interface. The card connects to the mainboard with a PCI connection, it's kind of a bridge between the old and new, that is , to give the end user an ability to use new SATA hardware along with old IDE hardware.

The card was connected to my mainboard for a few months without any use , until I bought a new HDD hard drive with a SATA connection. in addition to that , overtime I got an additional second hand DVD drive with an IDE interface, and since both IDE sockets on the mainboard were occupied - I used the card's socket.

Soon I ran out of connections on the card and since I wasn't going to buy a new motherboard for the sake of more SATA connections, I started looking for an alternative for this card and I found it on E-bay. I actually posted a review article about it here.

I can't say using this card was without trouble. More than a few times my OS just didn't recognize its presence on the mainboard and drives were "disappearing" from "my computer" menu. More than once I had to use alcohol fluids to clean up the PCI teeth that physically link between the card and the motherboard. I'm not saying there was something wrong with the card but when it happens every now and then you cannot really reach a different conclusion (the PCI socket on the board was periodically cleaned).

In addition to these difficulties , connecting SATA plug to the back end socket proved to be an issue on itself. The position of the back SATA socket wasn't planned thoroughly by the designers - after connecting the card to the mainboard and screwing it into the computer case the SATA socket and the back metal pieces of the case weren't aligned together properly - which made connecting a SATA plug a pretty uneasy operation. Therefor I had to manually distort the interfering metal by bending it accordingly , clearing a way between the SATA plug and the SATA socket. 

Bottom line - the card did its job when it had to and allowed me to continue use old hardware while gradually moving to the new SATA 1.5 hardware.