Am looking at getting a couple of Maxtor Maxline III 300Gb drives soon and was wondering if anyone had any reccomendation for a good PCI host card to use with them. Preferably from a reputable manufacturer and ones that support NCQ etc. Not had much luck with a quick search of manufacturers sites myself so any help would be appreciated
NCQ much like SATA-II's 300MB/s are over-rated. IMHO it doesn't make much sense to drop SATA HDs onto a PCI card unless you're desperate for more HDs (and have your PATA filled up). It will be nice when SATA add-in cards come in PCI-E form but a mobo with PCI-E is likely to have 2xPATA and 4xSATA which already offers up to 8 drives in total. Sorry I can't be of any specific help but that's some food for thought.
I can't find any. If you don't care about NCQ, they're easy enough to find, and it doesn't do a whole lot right now. If you get a PCI-X (not PCIE) card, you may find something, and PCIX can "overhang" a PCI slot and just lose (a huge amount) of bandwidth. Not something I'd recommend really, but it could work. Like Austin, I'd recommend waiting until a PCIE card is available for that purpose assuming your mobo supports it.