I did a comparison of hard drive performance using a serial ATA adaptor that you guys might want to check out.

Quote: “I have heard a lot of hype about how much performance serial ATA was suppose to give you and I have been a little skeptical. Is it not true that an ATA-133 Drive is suppose to move 133Mb/sec, well it's more like 80Mb/sec because physically the heads cannot pull that much data off the platters so my way of thinking is why another controller upgrade?  Why don't we start working on making solid state drives a reality instead?  I had to be optimistic about this and see if adapting an old ATA-133 hard drive to a serial ATA controller would gain any performance. “

Read more here

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Im interested in this adapter since i have the A7N8X DLX. How do u actually setup your HD's on the adapter? Is it just like connecting them to the onboard ide controllers? Ive never tried using Raid and i been told in order to use them on the SerialATA i have to use them in Raid.

No you don't need to use them in raid. Just plug the drive in and make sure its set to master and after it detects just don't mess with the raid setup and windows will detect it as a single drive.

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I also wanted to add. Some people are reporting problems with large capacity drives like 120Gb and higher. I have only tested it with  60Gb and it worked great.

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Wow that sounds great, i didnt think it was possible without setting up a raid array.

Yes it works quite well. Give it a try there cheap.

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HI , have a

Gigabyte GA-8INXP P4 MBD wich has 2 serial ATA slots.And I have two Highpoint Rockethead 100 adaptors. I am going to run 2 harddrives one 80 Gig and one 200 Gig  does anybody know where to find instalation instructions for this setup?

 

I don't think the 200Gb will work unless its a Maxtor ATA133. I tried a WD 200Gb a few days ago and it will not detect but the Maxtors work fine. I set up a stripe with 2X200Gb drives.

I have never had to wait so long for a drive to format 

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Also I wanted to add that the Highpoint controllers will not work at all on the Promise serial ATA controllers. I am using the Silicon image controller and they work great. But if you talk to Highpoint they say that they will only work with Highpoint controllers. Anyway if you need any help let me know I have put a lot of combinations together with the Highpoint adaptor.

 

I can at least tell you the combinations that will work and will not work. I think I may be updating my review with a list of known compatibilities and incompatibilities.

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I am a newbie to building systems, but with the help of a more knowledgeable friend I am giving it a try.  All of the pieces have been ordered and are beginning to arrive.  I am building a system using the Asus a7n8x deluxe board with Maxtor diamond max plus 80gb as a system drive and two Western Digital WD1200BBRTL  as the data drives.  I have ordered two of the Rockethead 100 adapters for the data drives.

I have a couple of questions:

• They being 120gb, might I have problems with the adapted drives being recognized?
• Could I get a third adapter and run the Maxtor as an SATA drive as well?
• If not, could the Maxtor be run IDE and the WDs as SATA striped RAID array?

Thanks for any help!

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Asus a7n8x deluxe
AMD 2500+
Corsair CMX512-2700C2 [2x]
windows x/p pro
Maxtor diamond max plus ATA/133 80gb
Maxtor diamondmax plus ATA/133 120gb[2x]
[all under construction]

You might want to see if the place you got the drives will trade them for maxtors becuse the WD's will not work with the Rockethead

I played around with that for over a week and finaly we found that a drive of that size has got to be ATA 133 in order to work. WD's are only ATA 100.

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Thanks so much for the info.  Back to the drawing board.

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Asus a7n8x deluxe
AMD 2500+
Corsair CMX512-2700C2 [2x]
windows x/p pro
Maxtor diamond max plus ATA/133 80gb
Maxtor diamondmax plus ATA/133 120gb[2x]
[all under construction]

RE: Rockethead not compatible with ATA/100 drives.

After a bit of searching, I have discovered that an Iwill adapter will work with ata/100 drives.  It may be easier to return the rocketheads than the hdds.

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Asus a7n8x deluxe
AMD 2500+
Corsair CMX512-2700C2 [2x]
windows x/p pro
Maxtor diamond max plus ATA/133 80gb
Maxtor diamondmax plus ATA/133 120gb[2x]
[all under construction]

I would just return the WD's and get the Maxtor 120 Gb Drives.

You might be able to get a different Serial ATA adaptor that will work with the WD’s. I have seen one that ASUS makes for the nForce motherboard that is so post to work with all drives. But I have never seen one for sale, just in the ASUS catalog. You might want to call them and ask about it.

The reason the Highpoint doesn’t work with some drives is because technically it’s only meant for highpoint controllers.

The reason I like the Highpoint adaptors though is because they are in plastic cases while all the other ones are just bare PCB’s. The highpoint ones in my opinion look classier and don’t stick out as far.

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I would use the ASUS ones before I would use the Iwill ones

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Hello,

      I recently built a PC using the A78NX-DX motherboard and I'm using two Seagate 80-gig ATA100 harddrives. I purchased two Hightpont Rockethead 100 adapters. The issue is that harddrives are not being detected by the Silicon Image controller. Both Harddrives are set to master (by default). The HD's are detected if they are connected to the IDE controller (Which was a verification test). I've tried all I know in order to get the HD's detected by the Silicon Image controller, but it just isn't going to happen at this point. Is there anyone out there that might have some insight as to what I might try in order to get the HD's detedted by the SATA controller ? Thank you in advance for your help.

 

-Chris