Promise SATA300 TX4 SATA 2.0

The Promise SATA300 TX4 has an open-source Linux driver and should work out of the box with recent Linux 2.6 kernel distributions. Installing this controller into an Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn setup (Linux 2.6.20 kernel), we had run into no setup problems. Connected to the PCI Serial ATA 2.0 controller was a Seagate ST3300622AS HDD, Seagate ST3200826AS, and ASUS SATA DVD-ROM drive. In Seagate's Barracuda 7200.9 SATA series, the ST3300622AS has a 300GB capacity that is a Serial ATA 2.0 drive with 16MB of cache. Meanwhile, the ST3200826AS belongs to the Barracuda 7200.8 series with a 200GB storage capacity and 8MB of cache. All three devices had worked well with the PCI controller and had no compatibility problems.

The test system we had used had a Sempron 3400+ processor, 1GB of DDR2, SeaSonic M12 700W, and an Abit NF-M2 nView motherboard. The NVIDIA GeForce 6150 and nForce 430 Chipset, which has four Serial ATA 2.0 ports on board, back this motherboard. For the sake of a simple comparison, we had used hdparm timed disk read tests on each of the two Seagate hard drives with the nForce 430 SATA connectivity and then tested with the Promise SATA300 TX4 controller.