Will a PCI SATA Controller card help?

I recently bought a SATA 3Gb HDD as a second drive.The drive wasn't even recognized at first.There are no SATA settings in BIOS.My motherboard is apparently designed to support SATA 1.5Gb,which explains the SATA connectors on the board itself.I've already done alot of web searching concerning this,and I'm not the only one who had this problem.I Googled around and found forum threads about my situation,and just figured I'd try a quick switch of the jumper and the problem was solved.

Now I'm wondering if putting a PCI SATA controller card will help me get around this data transfer rate limit.The less expensive cards I've seen note a maximum transfer speed of 150 MB.Yet others(more expensive) claim a maximum of 300MB.Are these differences in price and purported performance because of the chipset used on the cards?Is there really any difference in the potential speeds possible with these cards?Because at least one I saw advertised had a 3 Gig transfer,but it was a 2 port card and this was the combined speed of the two ports according to the product description.

Am I stuck at 1.5 Gigs/second?????:confused

 

Don't worry about it. The speeds you are looking at are the transfer rates of the connection between the controller and the drive, or the controller and the main board. What you need to keep in mind is that the fastest 15K hard drives on the market would have a hard time keeping up with 1.5Gb/s or 150MB/s transfer rates. Sure, the tiny bit of cache they have could flood the bus, but for any transfer of larger files, a single drive is just not fast enough. Your average hard drive is only capable of about 40 to 60 MB/s when reading or writing to the platters, well under 150MB/s.

 

You may want to check the HD itself for a jumper to switch it between 1.5 and 3.0. not all MB or HD for that matter are fully " backwartds compatible". So before you shell out cash for a card I would check to see if switch said jumper has any effect

 

I find it strange that your MB has SATA ports but no SATA settings in the BIOS. Have you looked into a possible BIOS upgrade?

 

Well,I'm not sure what you' mean,JPSchwartz.It seems that my query hasn't quite been understood and/or I just don't understand the reply as with JP,so I'll try to rephrase it as perhaps I should have at first.

I had to jumper the drive to limit it to 1.5Gb/s,because the motherboard was designed to support SATA 150(as it's referred to at Wikipedia - apparently an early phase of SATA development).It's pretty much cut and dry concerning this question,since setting the jumper to 1.5Gb/s,caused the drive to be detected,whereas,before doing so,it was not.As for "upgrading" the BIOS,if that means updating it,I've done that.

My question is whether or not installing a PCI SATA controller card is a way to get around the BIOS so that the drive would be detected AND operate while jumpered at 3Gb/s.Is there a driver for the card that makes this possible,or is it still dependent on the BIOS,and therefore limited to 1.5Gb/s?

Also,I don't understand the information I'm seeing about PCI data transfer rates:133 MB/s or 266 MB/s and it's dependence upon bus width - 32 or 64 bit.I'm sure if everything else worked out there would still be this limit to contend with,but if it was 266 MB/s peak,it would still be an improvement.

Anyone get what I'm saying?

Or do I not even get what I'm saying?

Can anybody tell me??????!!!!!:confused