Is anyone using a hardware SATA card?

[supchaka]

I'm thinking of picking up an adaptec SATA card. My file transfers are atrocious. I'm getting like 5mb transfers from disk to disk or disk to USB.

I'm using a Seagate 320gb and a WD 400gb. Ive tried the 3 modes, IDE RAID and AHCI in my bios, none of them made any difference. The only other thing I can think of is my software driven raid controller on the motherboard. One other thing that irritated me about my controller is that I wasnt able to Acronis the system because the hard drives didnt load before their software. I've never been too fond of them.

So I was wondering if anyone is using a SATA card has any complaints about it or can verify they are getting solid file transfers?

[mk1w86]

I have successfully used SATA cards with SIL3114 chipsets. These are PCI so you will only get 1.5GBPS (as opposed to 3GBPS with PCI-E) and have 4 ports.

The performance of the drives seem fine.

These cards can be flashed with a RAID firmware or a normal IDE firmware.

I use the normal IDE firmware with two 320GB Seagate drives in software RAID 1.

[Platypus123]

I have a PCI card with the Sil3114 chipset, but it's not a true hardware raid card (fakeraid). I'm not sure if any true hardware raid cards use this chipset.