I've used a Promise SATA150 TX2 quite a bit on a Abit BF6. It works fine as long as you find the right combination/ordering of all PCI cards to keep the chipset happy.

Though I usually just try to use a PATA-SATA adapter instead. It avoids the aforementioned touchy PCI bus. More PCI cards means more time to make things happy. The extra speed of a SATA 150 card vs UDMA 33 doesn't really matter to me.

There are several Promise and Silicon Image cards that should work pretty well. I have a Promise SATA TX2 that works fine. I don't have either of those motherboards - I'm using it as part of a project to resurrect an old K6 right now, but I've used it in a few machines over the years. Has drivers for WinNT4, 2000, XP, works out of the box in Linux and BSD, and the daniS506 driver for OS/2 supports it. Works in DOS, obviously.

I've got Promise S150 on order and also Sil3512 chipset based ones. Don't forget about IDE to SATA bridges, they work very well!

I've used a Sil3124 based Addonics ADSA4R5 on a 440GX board without issue. 440GX and 440BX are nearly the same thing so it should work the same on a BX.
Not sure how common that particular card is, but I guess other Sil3124 cards would likely be similar.

It's somewhat more modern than the early SATA cards, but I don't know if there's any advantage to that. It's SATA 300, but the extra speed won't matter on a BX.
Addonics' web page for the card: http://www.addonics.com/products/adsa4r5.php
says it requires PCI revision 2.3, which this era of boards generally do not support. However it seems to work anyway, as often is the case with things like this.
Maybe there are some BX era boards where it would fail, or maybe that requirement was just written to match the boards they considered relevant.
It also says it supports >2TB hard drives. The only time I tried that was when I tested a 3TB hard drive in HDAT2. It gave an error in the high ranges of the disk that didn't happen on another setup, so I remain unsure whether > 2TB really works correctly on that card. It doesn't matter if you're not running a file server from it but just a curiosity.

Addonics have some really nice stuff that's for sure.

I'll for sure report back when I get these controllers and will use them in a few projects 😀

Is using a SATA controller advantageous compared to using an IDE/SD-Card adapter?

Of all the solutions I tried, the one I liked most was the Promise 150 PCI Sata2. First reason for build quality where the card was IMHO much better built on the pcb, components and soldering, second reason it can be connected to a dvd drive when some others seems had problems with them.
Some sata to ide adapters I tried were all built cheap and gave me much problems. I don't know if exists better ones but I'll never use them again.

dexvx wrote:

Is using a SATA controller advantageous compared to using an IDE/SD-Card adapter?

On faster machines, and with fast storage, you will notice a difference. But because they have their own BIOS, it breaks through any hard drive limitations that the PC might have.

For me this isnt necessarily a speed as it is more of a convenience thing. My case has a plug and play 2.5 front mount slot. The power is molex and right now i am running a an abit with the 865 chipset and onboard sata. I was looking at downgrading to one of the above slot 1 mobos so i could jump back and forth between 200 mhz processors and maybe a 1ghz instead of using software patches. Plus actualy having an isa slot. Since the plug and play is mounted to the case i figured a sata controller would be my best option, if it wasnt i would just use a sata to ide adapter.

Also Phil does yours have the memory slot and does it make a difference speed wise or something?

dexvx wrote:

Is using a SATA controller advantageous compared to using an IDE/SD-Card adapter?

One disadvantage is that the controller is sharing limited PCI bus bandwidth. Not so much of an issue in earlier chipsets because the south bridge essentially runs at PCI speeds anyway, but it will be less performant with later south bridge chips which use faster, proprietary interconnects.

That makes sense im starting to i may be better off leaving it off and just instally usb mass drivers with plug and play since the games arent that big transfering anyway.

I just really like having that plug and play ssd so i can hook it up directly to my main rig for filr transfers

I'm using an SIL 3114 4 port Raid card on my Gateway with 440BX board