IOCrest SATA II 4 x PCI RAID Host Controller Card SY-PCI40010

This is a 32-bit universal 3.3v and 5v PCI card. No information was available to determine whether this is a PCI v2.1 card. If so, we can run the card at 66MHz and enjoy a maximum of (66 * 32) /8 = 264 MB/s theoretical data rate from this card (given that our MOBO's PCI is v2.1). If the card is below PCI v2.1 then we can only run the card at 33MHz and get a max of (33 * 32) / 8 = 132 MB/s theoretical data rate. Since this is a 32-bit card you should not mix it with a 64-bit card on the same PCI bus or you will slow the entire bus to a 32-bit data width at the frequency that this card runs at. PCI is a shared bus technology. That means you could potentially limit the entire bus to only 132 MB/s in the worst case thus forcing all of your PCI cards to share a maximum data rate of only 132 MB/s. SATA II has a theoretical data rate of 300 MB/s. In practice you should connect no more than a single SATA II drive to this card due to the limitations of the underlying bus technology (PCI). The only sensible use case for this card is to run it at 66MHz (i.e., if it is PCI v2.1) and attach ONLY ONE SATA II drive to the card. That gives you theoretically only 264 MB/s as state previously. If the card is not PCI v2.1, the only sensible use case is to connect a single SATA I drive to the card. In this case the drive is actually faster than the card topping out at a max of 150MB/s theoretical data rate vs. the 132 MB/s capability of the card. The absolute best use case for the card is to go into your BIOS, disable the horrendously slow option ROM scan and run the card at 66MHz. Ensure ONLY ONE SATA II drive is connected to the card because you aren't going to get one iota of performance improvement if you connect another drive. In fact, you will get much less throughput per drive with each additional drive you attach to this card. Attach the remaining drives of your RAID array to motherboard headers and use the software raid implementation for your operating system. With a good CPU and memory, software RAID is just as fast as option ROM based RAID management. In Debian Linux, the card is recognized even without an option ROM scan so you can completely scrap the option ROM and just go with mdadm. This will bypass the 2TB/drive limit as well which gives you the freedom to use much higher capacity drives with this card.

There's no way for me to review this product for PC/Win as I didn't try to install it on PC/Win. But the packaging and description say that this product works on Macs running OS X 10.3 and higher. That's complete hogwash. After a week of trying every SIL3124 driver available for Mac on the web, and attempting to reset the Flash memory on the card (which requires a PC, btw) with a new BIOS, I gave up. The card can be seen by your Mac System profile, but the card will not mount drives. The only good news: Amazon, as always, has a fabulous return policy, and I used it. Mac Users for the older towers have to buy a card from Sonnet Technologies (available from Amazon) which explicitly say they will run with the hardware/OS combo you are running.

I got this when I needed a few more SATA ports for my drive pool on my home server, since my system board only has 6 SATA ports, and I needed 7 for the 3 TB drives I have for the data side of things. Googled for the 64 bit windows 2008 drivers, found them easily enough, downloaded and installed, and was instantly recognized, no reboot needed. Got the drivebender software to recognize the extra two 3TB drives and added them to the pool right away. Only problem I had was that despite having no RAID enabled, not being set to boot, it still interrupted my reboot cycles on my system. My system bios was set to boot only from the CD or the first SATA drive on the system board, so nowhere in the BIOS was this even showing as an option, yet it would hang as soon as the boot process enumerated the drives on it. Only way around it was to hit the key to force the boot device option during the POST, and then pick the drive that the BIOS was set to default to anyway. Then it booted fine. I tried updating the firmware on the card, since there was a newer version out there, but that made no difference either. I finally then tracked down a newer version for my Atom D525 based board, and after flashing it, now I can boot without intervention, which is handy since this home server sits headless in my basement, just a power cable and network cable attached to it. Was a pain to go down there and temporarily hook up a monitor and keyboard if i wanted to bounce it. Now that I've worked through that, it's been working just fine. I can't attest to the RAID options since I'm using a different product to pool all of my drives, but it works fine as a standard SATA controller for me.

Documentation and support is nonexistent. The chipset is an stone age Silicon Image 3124 which normally wouldn't be an issue, but there is the little problem of SI not being around anymore and Lattice Semiconductor doesn't support SI legacy. My problem stems from the fact that out of the box this is flashed for RAID only, I got that but I bought this card with the understanding it will function as a pass through SATA adapter. Now the problem starts as the "Drivers and utilities" disk that comes with it is very thin in the D&U department. So after finding several forums with people having the same issue with the SI chipset I found a link to an alternate firmware that would allow the card to perform as I wanted. So I flashed the BIOS with the b5403.bin file using the SiFlashTool.exe command line executable, got success after the flash and rebooted into a different POST menu. Except now when I try to enter the BIOS config it give a no device found error and dumps back to my MB POST. Windows shows a generic SCSI adapter with no drivers loaded in device manager, but wont allow any drivers to be loaded. SiFlashTool.exe now cannot detect the card regardless of command line switches used.

First off, the bracket: The yellow-green box shown in the Amazon pictures indicates that a low-profile configuration is possible, but I got a generic--label brown box (okay, fine) but with no low-profile bracket. i have to go and buy another item ($17) from the same manufacturer to get low-profile bracket which appears to have the screwholes in the right place. My $33 PCI controller just became a $50 one, and I'm not 100% sure the bracket from the other product in the line will have its screwholes in just the right place. I'm going by eyeballs. Perhaps this thing will be such a wonder once installed, I won't care about all this fuss, but it's not getting installed for another week at least. Will update. [update] The install was a piece of cake. The software driver on the included CD worked with Win7 (32 bit). The drivers on the CD are organized in folders first by chipset manufacturer, then by OS and whether they are RAID/not-raid. The hardware I installed it on is an i3/i5/i7 generation Intel motherboard, in a Dell Optiplex 990, with built-in Intel RapidStore Technology for motherboard RAID. Interestingly, I could not select the non-RAID driver for this card, which was my first choice, because all I wanted out of this exercise was a "dumb", slave controller for 1 more SATA disk. Had to install the card's RAID driver for the OS and hope for the best. Not surprisingly, this card REALLY wants to be the device from which your computer boots. So if you do not want to boot from it, don't attach any OS bootable disks to it. Upon every power-on now, I get a brief message that boot media was not found attached to the card, and an opportunity to use a hot-key combination to go into the card's RAID configuration. I just sit back and let it be, and the system then proceeds as it used to, booting from the SATA drives attached to the motherboard. (2 drives in a RAID1 config). It is 2021, and in a perfect world, I would have had an open PCIe 4x slot on the motherboard, but a single old-school PCI slot was all that I had left open. But I got what I wanted: I had run out of internal SATA ports, and wanted an internal SATA SSD drive to host my Windows virtual memory file (pagefile.sys). This card got me there. Still dinging 2 stars for not including a low-profile bracket,

Pros: -cheap PCI 4 SATA-port card -good quality & sturdy SATA ports (but not super sturdy) which is excellent for this price range -installed out of the box under ubuntu 10.04 LTS without its crappy drivers -Recognized my Hitachi 3TB HDD Hitachi Deskstar 3.5 inch 3TB 7200RPM SATA III 6Gbps 64MB Cache Internal Hard Drive 0S03086 (which really made my day) beside my other Hitachi 2TB -SATA ports are designed with locks for cable latches (also compatible with non-latch SATA cables) Cons: -speed is kinda crappy (12 MiB/s) ... but I think it's cuz of my old Pentium 4 Motherboard (intel D850MV), my NIC 10/100 MiB/s & my bus speed...anyway, it's just a backup & a file server for 24/7 torrenting & LAN movies ------------------- UPDATE : July 27, 2011 ------------------- It appeared that I was using a 100M NIC ethernet PCI card in my Pentium 4 which was the bottleneck, I believe it would've given me more boost transferring lots of Gigs if I had used a 1000M NIC in the first place. Other: -I'm using this card just to add SATA ports to my old PC since it only has the old PATA ports -I had to install windows xp to flash it to the latest bios after installing the driver. The bios update can be found under the card properties in the windows hardware section or whatever it's called (2008 was the last time I used windows.... only Mac & Linux) -You need to download the bios from Silicon Image website & choose either r###.bin(r indicates for RAID I guess) for RAID setup or b###.bin (b=base) for non-raid setup -can't comment on RAID performance since I have a dedicated NAS for that QNAP 4-Bay Desktop Network Attached Storage TS-419P

I purchased this so I could move some cards in my computer around so I had access to both the PCI-E slots on my computer. I put this on the available PCI slot so I could install to 3.0 USB cards into the PCI-E slots on my computer. The only problem that I run across in using this card and after a little swapping of components everything worked fine. But I have a Blu-ray DVD writer on my system and when I initially installed this card. I plug my Blu-ray DVD writer into the card and when I booted up the computer this card did not recognize the Blu-ray DVD writer. What I did to resolve the problem was to change the Blu-ray DVD writer to a SATA on the motherboard with a hard drive on the system. That fixed everything.

I wish I could leave a positive review, but I've experienced nothing but a nightmare. I bought my first card and spent 2 days trying to get it to work under various operating systems just to find out that the card was bad. I exchanged it for a new one and the new card was bad as well. This is probably the absolute worst computer part I have ever purchased. DO NOT BUY THIS. I think this is my last purchase with Amazon. This is order #4 in a row of different things that has been broken or defective.

La placa base mini-ITX de mi server doméstico sólo tenía 2 satas. Quería añadir 2 más para más añadir HDs. sin cambiar la placa. Compré una controladora PCI mucho más barata pero nunca conseguí que fuese reconocida por el Ubuntu Server ni por otras distribuciones Linux. Con esta otra de Sybe, más cara eso sí, la compatibilidad es total. Lla detectó sin problema desde el primer momento, tanto la bios como en el sistema operativo. Por lo tanto, solucionó mi problema de añadir satas, tanto en windows (comprobado) como con otras distribuciones de Linux. Recomiendo mirar la compatibilidad antes de comprar, no sólo el precio. Es mi experiencia personal.

Eingebaut, funktioniert einwandfrei. Alles klappt sofort. Uneingeschränkt zu empfehlen, auch für jemanden, der sich nicht so gut auskennt. Vor allem für ältere Rechner geeignet, die nicht genügend S-ATA-Anschlüsse haben und nur über einen freien PCI-Steckplatz verfügen. Kleiner Tipp am Rande: Bevor Sie einen solchen Controller einbauen, schauen Sie nach, ob Ihr Netzteil genügend Stromanschlüsse hat. Sonst vielleicht neues Netzteil mit einplanen oder die entsprechenden Kabel (Y-Kabel) mit bestellen.

Works great. Product is exactly as described

Con esta tarjeta pude agregar mas disco duros y hacerlos en RAID 0 pero desde windows ya que el software de la arjeta me limita la capacidad del RAID, solo tener contemplado eso. POr los demas cumple las expectativas

This is my third RAID card from AMAZON, the first TWO said they did RAID but what they meant was from with in Windows it would do RAID but by BIOS. This does BIOS RAID which is exactly what I wanted, and transfer rates are good. Fast delivery and very happy