Looking for PCIe SATA card that can handle large drives

[latrosicarius]

EDIT: sorry for the long post.. I will put in italics the main point of this question.


Hello, my motherboard has two SATA controller chips. One of them seems to support the new large capacity (over 2.19 TB) "Advanced Format" hard drives. However, that controller chip only has 2 SATA ports; the other NVIDIA controller chip doesn't support the large drives at all (cant even format one without "IO Device Error").

So now I need another SATA port that can support a large capacity drive, so I guess I will need to get a SATA PCIe controller card. Unfortunately, most companies making them don't seem too inclined to label in the specs whether or not they can handle large capacity drives.

Anyone with an older motherboard who buys a 3TB drive will suffer from this problem. Its apparently such a problem that WD is now shipping their large capacity drives with a PCIe SATA card that can handle them included in the box!

I'm just wondering if anyone can tell me what that SATA card that is (make/model number etc) so I can buy one. Or alternatively, another SATA card that you know can handle the 3TB.

From this article (which is where I read about WD including the PCIe card with the drive), it says it has to be a Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI)-compliant Host Bus Adapter (HBA) card.

Please help

[vinnyT]

"Western Digital is shipping this Caviar with a HighPoint RocketRAID 62X Serial ATA card with a PCI Express x1 interface."

Credit to: http://techreport.com/articles.x/19871 (paragraph beneath pic of pci-e card).

Hope this helps.

[latrosicarius]

You, Sir, are a gentleman and a scholar.

The article you linked refers to the card as a RocketRAID 62X because that is what the manual calls it, and that's the way its printed on the PCB. However, it is actually a RocketRAID 620. The manual & PCB serve both the 620 and 622 models, so that's where the "X" comes from.

The only difference is that the 620 has two internal SATA 3.0 (6Gb/s) ports and the 622 has two external eSATA 3.0 (6Gb/s) ports.

Interestingly, if you look at the specs it says "Support up to 2TB Hard Drives", which is nothing special, seeing as 2.19TB is the limit of MBR bootable drives. I wonder if this is a mistake. I was looking through various HighPoint drives previously and did not see any that mentioned either UEFI or Advanced Format or GUID or anything else that would cause me to want to buy one if it wasn't for the techreport review you linked showing that WD is shipping these cards with their 3TB drives.

Thanks

[vinnyT]

You're welcome, glad you found it of interest.

[latrosicarius]

This is the card I ended up going with.
Koutech IO-PESA230

It's a SATA III (6Gbps) PCIe card that has AHCI on and can support greater than 2.19TB drives (e.g. 3TB). On boot-up, it has a BIOS config screen where you can arrange physical drives into virtual drives (I'm assuming it has limited RAID 0|1|JBOD functionality, but I did not try that). If you simply ignore that BIOS config screen, it will pass all the physical drives to the OS directly so you can see and set them up in Windows Disk Manager.

In order for Windows to use this card and see the drives, an AHCI driver is required. I used the driver from Marvell on the supplied CD, which is also available for download from Koutech's website if you go to Downloads and search for "PESA230". However, many people have stated on various websites that Windows Vista/7 has a built-in AHCI driver, which they were able to use just fine even though it is stated by Windows as not being compatible with this card.




In regards to the previous post about the RocketRAID card, the lack of correct/reliable information on the manufacturer's website discouraged me from going that route.