Help with a PCI - SATA card.
 

My 8 year old home computer is has a failing hard drive. :(

Before it dies I need to get a new hard drive. My computer is old enough that it does not have SATA. I could do the easy thing and just get another ATA drive and clone it and be done. But I figure that "while I am in there" I should just go to the faster SATA drive. That means I need a PCI card to run the SATA drive. A lot of the cards on the market do NOT support bootable drives.

My question to the geeks: Which PCI card would you recommend?

I just want a simple bootable SATA drive. 2 port cards will be fine. I don't need external SATA. The only card I hve found is the Rosewill RC-215 VIA PCI SATA 1.5G x2 / ATA 133 (IDE) x1 Controller Card

My current hard drive is just 300 GB and is plenty big.

I know a lot out you will recommend an all new computer. I don't want to mess with that. My home computer is used check email, surf the net and run Quicken.

I never play games or get into heavy computing so the current computer serves the purpose just fine. I just need a new hard drive.

Investing in a PCI Card is akin to buying spare parts to keep the Outhouse running longer. If you are insistent on keeping the old machine, go the cheapest route you can find since the hard drive will cost more than the machine is worth (other than to you). The faster hard drive won't help Internet speed or Quicken (unless you have huge files).

The shop I have dealt with for many years had a USB adapter with a small junction box and cables that allows you to hook ANY type of hard drive to a USB port and grab the data off it. I used it when the drive in my laptop was starting to fail so I put in a new one and hooked the old one up one last time and sucked whole drive to a backup external drive.

Much better than a "card" and it woks with SATA, USB, thumb drives, IDE and most all types. It was $25 if I remember correctly.

I have to buy a hard drive to keep the computer running.

I can get a 1 TB SATA drive cheaper than an old IDE 300 GB drive.

When the day comes to get a new computer I can put the drive in an external enclouure and have a backup.

A new computer will have Windows 7, and I will spend a lot of time and money to get it set up. $100 bucks will keep my old computer running just fine.

With any new hard drive you will be spending some time installing the OS... unless you plan to keep using your old hard drive as the bootable (not a good idea if it's on the way out)

Although I am not a computer expert by any stretch, I would recommend keeping it simple. Buy a new ATA drive and install your favoured OS on it and install your failing drive as a slave. You can then copy all your important files at your leisure. If you're using Windows XP you can use the files and settings transfer wizard to make the transfer easier ( Make the transfer file prior to pulling the plug on your old drive )
If you only use the computer for the purposes stated and have been happy so far save yourself some grief. When it's time for a newer computer you can then pull your hard drive from the old machine and install that as your new backup drive. (all my PCs have dual internal drives. I've been burned once... never again!)
Besides, a SATA drive plus a new PCI card must cost more than just a replacement ATA drive?

Best of luck anyway!

*** Make sure you have the OS installation disks and drivers before you get started. Without those you are dead in the water.
You will have to download updates like SP1-? for XP.
Remember than any special tweaks or settings will be lost.
Depending on what you use, you may lose old e-mails unless you manually save them.

FWIW: I have an USB external Hard drive that I use for data backup (you can buy a small one for about $60-70). Once a month, I use windows explorer to copy all my data into a folder on the external. A few clicks, go watch a TV program, come back and its done. It is a stable backup that can be used with future computers. I would buy this rather than a PCI card.

I am going to clone my old drive to the new one. It will be the same computer with just a new much bigger drive. No set-up, no installing files. The computer boots up exactally as before.

All I have to do is download this from Western Digital:

http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119&wdc_lang=en

Burn this ISO file to CD and boot from the CD, it does the rest. Super simple.

I actually own and run the full version of Acroness. I can clone any drive not just WD drives. It does a backup to my current external drive. I also back up my data on-line with another program. I am a belts & suspender type with it come to computer backup.

Glen, if the pc is that old, there is a chance it will not recognize a 1t drive or at least not all of the space. You almost need to find the smallest drive you can...

sata cards are cheap - SIIG is a decent brand I've used in the past with good lock for cards like this. When you try to boot the OS to the SATA drive - if you don't have the SATA drives installed PRIOR to that first boot you will likely blue screen.

Install the SATA card first and make sure your OS recognizes it - you still may end up with a BSOD upon boot though because of the change in architecture...

Motherboard/CPU/RAM combos are pretty cheap if your case and power supply will support the new stuff.

Glen: that software looks pretty good. Does it require a Western Digital or will it work with any Hard drive?

Well, you knew we'd say it, so we'll say it, new PC.

Look at everything else that gets upgraded if you went with something like this:
HP Workstation xw4400 Core 2 Duo 1.8Ghz / 1GB Memory (HP COM14053) : surpluscomputers.com

Also already has XP preinstalled, just move your applications and files and be done for another few years.

I know how to fix just about whatever, but trying to get an OS to boot off of a new interface card entirely can be super frustrating, I don't find it worth it much anymore.

I've been using the Sabrent 4 port SATA PCI host controller card ($30) and have had very good luck with it on Win7, Server 2003 and Windows Home Server

Problem may be in booting off mobo chipsets...

That said, get a card that has RAID support, get a couple of 1.5tb drives, set them up as RAID-1 and keep your data on it.