StarTech.com 4 Port PCI Express 2.0 SATA III 6Gbps RAID Controller Card with HyperDuo SSD Tiering - PCIe SATA 3 Controller Adapter , TAA (PEXSAT34RH)

I use this card in a 2TB RAID 1 (mirror) array with 6Gb/s drives and it works great. I skipped all the HyperDuo stuff because it's hard enough to get Windows to put the files where I want them, so I don't want some driver trying to move files around. I also didn't install any [Windows] drivers; I just use the BIOS driver. Windows sees the RAID array as a single drive and it works fine.Performance for a RAID 1 array using "fake" (Intel) MB RAID was 4.1; using the StarTech card instead brought the performance to 5.9.Some RAID cards get really hot, but the big heatsink on the StarTech barely warms up at all (in RAID 1 mode at least).There are header pins for optional drive activity LEDs. The LEDs illuminate when a drive is attached and blink when it's accessing. To reverse the polarity (so the LEDs flash on when the HDD is accessed) a little patch cable consisting of one mosfet and one resistor per LED does the trick.StarTech email support was responsive and polite, but couldn't help with my one issue (I asked if there was a jumper option to reverse the activity LED polarity).Some caveats: I found that the HDDs, even in RAID mirror mode, are formatted such that they require a StarTech card to work (they are not recognized if plugged directly into the MB); so you might want to make sure you have a spare StarTech card just in case. Also, the BIOS HDD for the StarTech card comes up as unit 0, and if you have a boot SSD drive plugged into the MB it makes Windows more difficult to work with.

Pros:- low cost RAID controller that works / easy to set upCons- Well, I wouldn't say the data transfer speed is terrible through the RAID card, but it is definitely a little slower than just doing RAID through the integrated RAID controller on the motherboard. I have 4x 4TB WD Red Pro 7200rpm 256MB cache in RAID 10, and write speeds definitely dropped ~20% through this RAID card vs just using onbaord RAID controller. In reality, this is not that big of an issue, since the write speed is still above what my 1-Gbit home network bottlenecks the read / writes to / from my fileserver to which is ~120MB/s.- limited sector size (or whatever the term is) to 64KB when configuring RAID 10 through the BIOS- the SATA ports are a little looser than typical . The cables don't really fit like gloves, but fit looselyOther NotesDuring initial setup, the moment I plugged in the drives to the card, the computer wouldn't post at all, and when I disconnect the drives from the card, the computer boots again just fine. It turned out to be a bad SATA cable - after switching out the cable, boots just fine with minimal delay if any in boot time. Just something to watch out for, as a bad sata cable to a non-boot drive prevents the whole system from posting.

Using this expansion card to accommodate 4x Samsung 850 EVO 500GB SATA SSDs and performance is pretty terrible. Seeing ~430MB/s reads and writes in a RAID0 configuration via Win11 Storage Pools/Disk Management. Set up an identical Win11 software RAID0 with the same SSDs and SATA cables to the onboard X670 RAID ports and seeing ~2500MB/s reads and write speeds.

They need to rewrite the on-line manual for better ease of use, but otherwise this is a nice little SATA 4 Port card (only used for 1 week so far). My Dell T7500 dual Xeon processor workstation now shows my WD Red 4Tb drives that otherwise were invisible or maxed at 2Tb without a multiport card. I set the multiple 4Tb drives up as RAID 1 mirrors. I decided not to trust the hyperdrive with my solid state drives, as system reliability and recover-ability is my #1 concern I am using this Startech card only for mirrored 4Tb Red data drives that I also back up externally.The Startech instructions are not intuitive and take careful reading of instructions. But, the instructions are not lengthy.I previously had a LSI 9640-8i card that ate expensive custom backup batteries and constantly warned about rewriting data even if the added battery backup was used and was charged, had a huge set-up requirement, had more perpetual software bugs than a rotted tree trunk, and still ended up corrupting my drives in under 2 years (faster than that if I had not used a RAID - drives still good, but data corrupted due to write-backing), so I hope for better long term results with this simple card. I am now using a error-correcting solid state 1Tb clone of my new solid state system drive for system backup this time.My battery backup for the whole PC will provide sufficient protection against power outages that may occur when writing to the mirror drives through the Startech.

Seemed to work fine at first with a Windows 10 PC to connect additional SATA hard drives but it was tricky to get the driver installed. The new ASUS MB in my tower PC only has 6 SATA ports for connecting my hard drives and SATA SSDs. My old MB had 12 Sata ports. So I ordered a new StarTech SATA 4 port card off of Amazon, got everything connected but still could not access the drives because for some reason Windows 10 did not automatically install the driver. So I had to install a driver from the CD that came with card but it only had drivers for Windows XP so the XP driver kept causing blue screens of death. So I went into Device Manager and rolled back the Asmedia106X SATA Controller driver for the card which resulted in the proper Standard SATA AHCI Controller Windows 10 driver getting installed and now it all seemed to work but I started getting blue screens again.Update: I was still getting occasional blue screens so I switched to 9207-8i 6Gbs SAS 2308 PCI-E 3.0 HBA IT Mode for ZFS FreeNAS unRAID 2*SFF-8087 SATA Host Bus Adapter which solved the blue screen problem. No more blue screens now.