One alternative that costs about £5 (from China) is the Promise TX2plus PCI card. It's a 3Gbps SATA card with a single PATA connector too. It's about two to three times as fast as the VIA cards. Maxtor do their own rebrand using the Promise controller.
Curious question : At what point does ye Olde Fashioned PCI bus become a limiting factor here?
Looking at USB 3 cards, Gigabit Ethernet or 3Gbps SATA , won't they all exceed the bandwidth of PCI? Obviously, I'd hope they would work ok, but be limited in speed by the throughput of the PCI bus, not of their native medium.
I recently bought a Gigabit PCI-e ethernet card, imagining that putting it in a plain PCI slot would be a bottleneck. But now I've used my only PCI-e slot, and what if I want a USB 3 card too?
Am I just being daft, and PCI can handle it?
Ian