SATA on Soyo Dragon KT400 Mobo

[wctyler]

My Soyo Dragon KT400 Mobo lists optional SATA connection. I got the following description from their site:

SOYO’s Serial ATA Kit allows users with parallel ATA computer systems to utilize this new interface technology without having serial ATA hard drives or host controller!

Serial ATA allows for a more compact system design through its use of thin interconnects. Addressing many of the limitations of parallel ATA, users can now take advantage of faster transfer speed, lower voltage, thinner cables and high pin efficiency offered by the new serial ATA transfer protocol.

SOYO provides flexible riser cards that connect between the motherboard and the hard drives (serial or parallel) for complete backward compatibility. The embedded Marvell chip in the riser cards converts parallel signals to serial without degradation in speed, and allows users to use both parallel and serial hard drives interchangeably.

I was wondering if anyone had used this. Does it work well? I was thinking about ordering a couple and a couple SATA drives to use as RAID 0, and I was wondering if it was worth the extra money.

[Xtreeme]

Wait a minute. It just converts the signal and pin layout etc! Its not a standalone SATA controler chip and driver? Weird. How can ya run 4 ports then? Or only 2 either parallel or seriel. Thats really odd. As for raid 0. No not really worth it. I mean for that much dough (two drives sata) you could get a scsi drive and controler that would woop its butt. Now a SINGLE sata 15k (available soon) drive is worth every $. For now you'd have to settle for 10k im affraid. And still little pricey. But by the time you buy x2 drives and get no more storage room from raid 0 its not worth the effort. Just like IDE wasnt. They are both ATA drives. They both have same hinderences. Sereil like with mem just allows higher bandwidth to and fro the hdd. But within its slow. So it helps nodda till 15k really. And its main gain. Is more air flow less cable mess. Thats for now anyhow.