System Setup:


The Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9 80GB SATA 8MB used was graciously provided by:

It can be found there for a mere €95.

JMke's Test Setup
CPU	Pentium 4 "C" 2400Mhz
Mainboard	Asus P4C800
Cooling	Thermalright SLK900U / Thermalright SP-94
Memory	1 * 512Mb PC3700 Corsair
Video	nVidia Quadro MX
Hard drive	Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9 80GB SATA 8MB

Testing:

When booting up the first time in Windows the new hardware wizard will pop-up and ask you for drivers, the included floppy disk luckily has them ;) so software installation was a breeze!

We used 2 popular benchmarks together with some good old file copying and timing the results. The file copy was done onto the same hard drive.

First up, HDTach:




Next we used Sisoft Sandra 2004 file benchmark:



And finally the file copy (9006 files in 1006Mb // 1 file of 700mb):





Conclusion:

As shown in the results above, this PCI SATA Card is not only on PAR with the onboard SATA controller, it even manages to outperform it in some tests. For those of us looking to buy a new future proof hard drive, this PCI card can already *upgrade* your system to support it. If you already have a SATA-capable motherboard and you are looking to expand the amount of SATA channels without losing performance, look no further!

I would like to thank Nick from NYGL.com and Joey from ACRyan.com for making this review possible.