Additional S-ATA Controller for Z87, i7-4790K Build

Thanks to the Buyer's Guides and this great Forum my first Hackintosh build was a great success.

I am running a GA-Z87X-HD3 with an i7-4770K and 32GB Crucial Ballistix Tactical.

Since this machine is mainly used for Video-Editing I need as many SSD's and Harddrives as possible and the 6 onboard S-ATA ports are already used up. 1TB SSD for System, 2x1TB WD Black as mirrored RAID, 2x3TB as Storage + BluRay Writer.

Which S-ATA Controller can you guys recommend? I does not need to be RAID, I only need to add 2 4GB drives for storage at the moment.

Would this card work without any additional changes? (ASM1061 chipset)

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005B0A6ZS/

Or is there any card available that "just works" and has 2 internal and 2 e-sata ports?

How about this one? (Marvell 9235 chipset)

http://www.amazon.com/IO-Crest-Internal-Controller-SI-PEX40063/dp/B00AZ9T2SW/

Thanks!!

Anyone? I can't believe nobody is using additional S-ATA controllers...

Any advice is appreciated!

Thanks!

dan82de said:

Anyone? I can't believe nobody is using additional S-ATA controllers...

Any advice is appreciated!

Click to expand...

Several people have had success with Rocket Raid controllers.

Type Rocket Raid into Search for details.

Good Luck

I just installed the first one you linked to in the original post. Seems to work fine out of the box. Haven't had time to test it much but System Profiler reports that its speed is 6gbs and I can't tell that it adds much, if any, time to the boot time.

Well, things have gone pear shaped since I posted the above comment. I had originally hooked it up to a 128 GB Sandisk SSD drive and everything seemed to go fine EXCEPT I got a notice from HWMonitor every time I booted saying that the drive was overheating! It showed some ridiculous number of degrees centigrade in the HWMonitor menu. Not sure what to do about that.

There was no delay in the boot time.

My intention wasn't really to use the SSD on the card. I was just testing the card to see if it actually worked.

This evening, I hooked up my 4 TB Western Digital Black drive to the card and my oh my what a disappointment. The computer took forever to boot. I'm talking several minutes...compared to just a half minute normally.

What I was really wanting to do was move my 4TB drive to that card, then hook up that spare SSD drive to the motherboard SATA port and use it to install Linux Mint so I could triple boot. But I see that's not going to work unless I can get rid of the huge lag in boot time.

Thank you P1LGRIM and EddyMac for you advice and experiences.

I think I am not gonna take any chances and get the Highpoint RocketRaid 2720SGL.

$150 is a lot of money, but considering that the data on the hard drives is the sole reason for using the computer it will be worth it.

I will let you guys know how it goes once I have it installed.

OK I discovered that the problem was the WD 4TB drive. For some reason, the card doesn't like that drive. I have now hooked it up to a 1 TB drive (WD) and it works great. It adds about 5 seconds to boot time.

Moving that 1 TB drive to the card frees up one of the motherboard SATA ports, to which I have attached a SanDisk SSD and installed Linux Mint. I'm now officially triple booting.