tegrady wrote:I was thinking about one of those adapters, but I have heard that they only run in PIO mode, which I believe is slower than DMA 33mb/s, right? If I use the Promise controller card, I should get the full 133mb/s provided by the PCI bus, right? Thanks.
No the adapter should run the drive at SATA 1.5gb/s and it will negotiate what the motherboard supports, in the 440BX's case UDMA 33. UDMA 33 is definitely a bottleneck but it's not that big of a deal. I've seen these adapters run UDMA 133 on newer chipsets and move ~95MB/s, which is about the maximum you can get from UDMA 133.
I have both the type that connect to the drive and the the type that connect to the motherboard. The type that connect to the drive is probably the safest bet.
I suggest looking for ones that are said to work with the old XBox. The old XBox is picky about these adapters and so I think this is a pretty good way to avoid the bad ones.
https://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=612