I am giving consideration to getting a smaller board, to go with a smaller (micro-ATX) case; namely, the H97M Pro4, along with a standard (non-OC) i7-4790, since I doubt that I will do any overclocking except maybe with my GPU (GeForce GTX 960).
The problem is, I have 7 SATA devices (5 hard drives and 2 optical devices), and the H97 board has 6 SATA sockets (all SATA 3.0). I'm looking at a 2-port PCI card (supposedly non-RAID, according to the eBay seller), similar to this one...
...to hold one or 2 of my devices; most likely, my Blu-ray burner (which will be drive D) and my DVD burner (drive E), because the maximum SATA speed of this controller (which is 1.5Gb/s or SATA 1.0 speed) is irrelevant when it comes to optical drives.
This device comes with a driver CD, but is such a device plug-and-play-ready when it comes to Win7/8/10 builds? Or should I be prepared to create a floppy (and use my USB floppy drive) to install the drivers when I get ready to install my 64-bit Win7? Again, I intend to use this controller for my optical drives.
Do I go with this controller, or should I consider another one (maybe PCI-e) for my optical drives?
The problem is, I have 7 SATA devices (5 hard drives and 2 optical devices), and the H97 board has 6 SATA sockets (all SATA 3.0). I'm looking at a 2-port PCI card (supposedly non-RAID, according to the eBay seller), similar to this one...
...to hold one or 2 of my devices; most likely, my Blu-ray burner (which will be drive D) and my DVD burner (drive E), because the maximum SATA speed of this controller (which is 1.5Gb/s or SATA 1.0 speed) is irrelevant when it comes to optical drives.
This device comes with a driver CD, but is such a device plug-and-play-ready when it comes to Win7/8/10 builds? Or should I be prepared to create a floppy (and use my USB floppy drive) to install the drivers when I get ready to install my 64-bit Win7? Again, I intend to use this controller for my optical drives.
Do I go with this controller, or should I consider another one (maybe PCI-e) for my optical drives?
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