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.

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