I think your adapter gets pretty respectable speeds (just a bit faster than Ultra DMA/33). Thats good enough for the Pentium 3 era controllers. My cheap adapter (a Sintechi) tops out at 25 MB/s.

Will your SAGE adapter read a card pre-formatted and loaded with data from another device? If so, does it read back after modification in the SAGE controller?

fosterwj03 wrote on 2024-09-15, 13:40:

I think your adapter gets pretty respectable speeds (just a bit faster than Ultra DMA/33). Thats good enough for the Pentium 3 era controllers. My cheap adapter (a Sintechi) tops out at 25 MB/s.

Will your SAGE adapter read a card pre-formatted and loaded with data from another device? If so, does it read back after modification in the SAGE controller?

Unfortunately it won't read pre-formatted cards from another device, and cards formatted on the SAGE controller can't be read on other SD card adaptors. At least, I haven't found a way yet in Windows.
Maybe its using some type of encryption or a proprietary format?
Havent' been able to find the datasheet for this controller yet..

holdencars11 wrote on 2024-09-15, 12:28:

I found a "TF to SATA" adaptor that wasn't using the usual Sintechi (SD to IDE) solution (also seen Sintechi used with SD to SATA with a bridge chip).

Sintechi devices are limited to 25MB/s because they can only access the SD at "high speed" access mode.

Looks like the Sage chip isn't limited to 25MB/s but you might be limited to UDMA2. Are you using an 80 conductor cable?

It would be interesting to see how fast it goes when directly connected to Sata.

holdencars11 wrote on 2024-09-15, 12:28:

I found a "TF to SATA" adaptor that wasn't using the usual Sintechi (SD to IDE) solution (also seen Sintechi used with SD to SAT […]
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I found a "TF to SATA" adaptor that wasn't using the usual Sintechi (SD to IDE) solution (also seen Sintechi used with SD to SATA with a bridge chip).
Decided to give it a go... its a bit of a mixed bag. Faster in some cases than the Sintechi....kinda mixed.
But the sd card is unreadable when plugged into an ordinary SD card adaptor.

Looking at the basic Specs of the SAGE Microelectronique S682 is seems like it is intended for eMMC, and security focused applications. I'm unsure if this has anything to do with why the card becoms unreadable when I try to mount it in Windows.
But if I connect it to a SATA to USB reader, it works fine with the original SD card formatted on the SAGE controller.

Seems to work fine with a seperate JMicron SATA to IDE bridge attached to the SAGE adaptor, and behaves fine with DMA mode enabled.

Take a look at some basic benchmarks... its a mixed bag, but it also may be limited by my SATA to USB adaptor and the micro SD cards I used..

I know there are many disk drive alternatives out there, I was just curious about this SAGE controller, as I couldn't mind much information on it!

Could you perhaps check if it supports micro sd cards over 128 gb? The Sintech adapter supports only 28 lba, thus it maxes out on 128 gb cards.