Windows 7 SATA II Controller Card

[rjpeck2]

Hi,

Can you suggest a PCI SATA II controller card which supports windows 7. Also, I noticed that you can get windows 7
to work with a promise ULTRA133 controller using either WinXP or Visa drivers. Can you suggest which is better.

Thanks

[hdsentinel]

Thanks for your question.

Basically most controllers should work - it is only the question of the drivers.
Many hard disk controllers have no proper drivers for Win7 (or even Vista), especially if we speak about 64 bit OSes.

Also the current setting of the controller may limit the detection because of the different driver sets. AHCI / RAID mode or using RAID firmware on some cards may also block the detection of disk information.

I recommend to check the Disk controller compatibility page at http://www.hdsentinel.com/compatibility_disk_controllers.php
There you can see the currently supported controllers (which should work under Win7 also) but some of them may require special attention (updated drivers, non-RAID firmware and so).

Personally I do not really recommend Promise. If you check the above page, you may see that the nearly all Promise controllers have some issues. The TX2/TX4 may even stops responding on standard hard disk information detection if there are two or more drives attached. I already asked Promise long time ago about this situation but received no response from them yet. I'm still investigating and researching to add better support for Promise cards and to obtain disk status information via special ways as I had success previously with Silicon Image controller cards.

For more information about detection issues, importance of drivers and workarounds, please see http://www.hdsentinel.com/faq.php#q11
There it is described that for NVidia (not for Promise) it really helped to install XP drivers under Vista and newer OSes. However as NVidia released newer drivers, it may be not required any more. But many manufacturers do not want to release drivers for their older, discontinued products.

Personally I did not try Ultra133 controller under Win7 but I think it may work without problems and provide complete disk information about attached disks, without the need of using XP/Vista drivers.

[klauzser]

Most controller you can buy these days work with Windows 7 and soon with Windows 8.