SATA II card sought

So I have 2 motherboards, both have dead or dying sata controllers. I have a SATA II disk and have tried to get either of them operate continuously on all of the ports, but it always fails after a few hours or after a day, randomly. I messed with bios back to defaults and even swapped power-supply. I even pumped up the cooling, it makes no difference - its not a thermal thing as far I can see at all. So my question is?

Can I reasonably easily run a Debian/linux o/s and have it boot directly from a add-on pciexpress sata contoller II card? like this one
http://www.amazon.co.uk/StarTech-co...03470859&sr=1-1&keywords=sata+controller+card
Will I (someone) be able to get Debian to somehow boot off of such a card?

Alternately should I boot from USB , mount a ramdrive, and then place the drivers for the sata card on the USB stick system?

 

Welcome to Major Geeks!

I don't see why that wouldn't work. I had to buy such an add-on card for a motherboard that didn't have any IDE ports, and I wanted to use my existing IDE optical drives. The card I bought had two SATA II ports, and one IDE . . . it worked fine for the optical drives, and one of the SATA ports worked for a hard-drive I added in a while later. Motherboard could see the optical drives and the hard-drive normally. I never used the add-on card to connect a boot drive, but the computer never had a problem booting from the DVD-Rom or DVD-RW connected to the card.

Now, if there is any loss of performance by doing this, I don't know. I do know that some controller chips are said to perform better than others - like Intel is supposed to be faster than Marvell I've been told. If any suspected performance loss has any real-world impact is the true question. I have a motherboard that has two SATA III ports run off a JMicron JMB362 controller, and the hard drives connected to it seem as zippy as ones connected to the Intel controlled ones.

I believe the add-in card I bought was also controlled by a Jmicron chip. You should be able to boot to a Linux based Live disk and install drivers for the card if needed . . . or the card itself might have a bootable driver disk.

 

I have long been a wannabe Geek, thanks for the welcome Spad.

My budget was limited, because the motherboard is already 5 years old, and £50 (GBP) would get me a new board anyway. Some asking about in my office from the IT department who don't ever do this kind of "repair" told me it would probably not work well. But I just got another confirmation from someone like yourself who has had joy. I'll have another scan to see if I can find a jMicron chipset card inside my budget and let you guys all know once I get it tried out.
*pulls out credit-card*

 

Worked
Disabled onboard controller completely and only had to shift the jumpers across on the card. (Moving the jumpers from the external to the internal position was obvious but no document for users exists.)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00560ZOGO/ref=oh_details_o01_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
You do not need drivers, it jsut works without any fiddling. Do not even bother with the enclosed cdrom. Performance is pretty much same what the on-board controller gave me (using SATA II drive, while the card is SATA III capable).

 

Good to hear. Glad you got it squared away, and thank you for posting back about your results.

Your performance estimate is what I expected. I've always thought that any "performance loss" by using this configuration would only be evident (if present at all) perhaps by doing a series of benchmarks. I honestly don't believe there is any real-world loss of performance that would impact the regular user. After all, a lot of manufacturers use SATA ports that are controlled by different chips, and on the same motherboards. I have an ASUS P8P67 board that has SATA controllers from Intel, Marvell, and JMicron. As far as the PCI-E interface goes, I'd imagine they have plenty of throughput for the job.