PCI SATA card advice needed

[salparadise]

Greetings,

I have a mobo with 2 SATA ports and 1 IDE port.
I have 3 SATA drives.
I bought a VIA expansion card but no distro recognises it.
I'm currently using an old IDE DVD drive but would rather have the SATA DVD drive as it's faster.

Does anyone have any experience with PCI SATA cards? (It must be PCI and not PCIE).
Why are SATA cards so expensive (£30-50 on Amazon)?

[Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec)]

Which VIA chip does it use ?

and when you say it's not recognised .. do you mean for booting, or at all ?

I have a PCI SATA card (can't remember the chip) nothing on it is bootable .. but once booted Ubuntu recognises the attached drives.

IIRC, the more expensive ones have an addressable (by the BIOS) boot ROM.

[salparadise]

It's a VIA VT6421A card.

Neither Fedora, Mint nor Slackware could see it either before, during or after boot. In the end I swapped the SATA DVD in my PC for the IDE DVD in my daughter's PC. The card was only £5 so it's not a heartbreaker.

[Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec)]

OK, mines a VT6421 .. dunno what the difference is, but the driver is sata_via .. have you tried modprobing that ?

Also worked for this guy:
http://kernelreloaded.blog385.com/index.php/archives/ubuntu-and-via-vt6421-pci-sata-howto/
but again it states VT6421 not VT6421A