Depends what you intend to stick it into.

Silicon Image cards can be found cheaply all over the place, but tend to require PCI 2.2, so 440BX or older is no-go. If you want to use it on older boards, a Promise controler might be more -er- promising, but no idea how far back you can go with those things...

dionb wrote:

Depends what you intend to stick it into.

Silicon Image cards can be found cheaply all over the place, but tend to require PCI 2.2, so 440BX or older is no-go. If you want to use it on older boards, a Promise controler might be more -er- promising, but no idea how far back you can go with those things...

The objective is to stick it into a Asus Cusi-M mATX board with a SiS630E chipset and a Pentium III 1GHz. The board is fairly well equipped with decent onboard sound (CMI 8738) and AGP video. However, it is a bit limited when it comes to the PCI slots, as PCI slot 1 shares its interrupt with the onboard VGA, and PCI slot 2 with the onboard USB controller (slot 3 shares it with the AMR slot, which won't be used anyway). I plan to install Windows 98SE on it.

SiS630E is a PCI 2.2 chipset, so you should be able to use just about anything. Silicon Image cards are almost certainly cheapest and easiest to find, but Promise stuff is also an option with probably better featured drivers.

As for the low-profile bit, if you go for a card with no external connectors the actual PCB will certainly be low-profile. If the bracket is full size, either remove (and let the PCI slot hold it), or cut it down to LP size. New in box these things frequently came with both brackets, but 2nd hand I've never seen them.

Thanks.

Just make sure the card has Windows 98SE drivers. The early Si311x SATA1 cards did, but the later ones likely didn't. Sadly the SATA1 cards tended to have weird compatibility problems with later SATA2 and 3 drives.