IO CRESTI/O CREST 2 Port SATA III PCI-e 2.0 x1 Controller Card Asmedia ASM1061 Non-Raid with Low Profile Bracket SY-PEX40039

For my intended purpose this is ridiculous. So cheap for exactly what I was looking for. I have several hard drives and disk drives and ran out of SATA ports to use on my mother board (only has 6). Was looking for a adapter that would make use of my unused pci-e 2.0x1 slots on my board (or even the pci-e 2.0 x8 and x4 slot since I only run 1 video card these other ports just collect dust) but give me more SATA ports. This fit the bill perfectly and for much less than several other brands adapters on the market. Not only do you gain 4 SATA III(6gb/s) rather than most other adapters only give you 2 SATA ports and are not always SATA III. I followed instructions but if you are even slightly schooled on computers and computer parts you could just guess what to do fairly easily. Unhook everything, power cord disconnect and install the card in the pci-e 2.0x1 (or x4 x8 x16) or pci-e 1.0x1 (or x4 x8 x16). With the pci-e 1.0 it will just run at half the speed if you have an ancient board but is still compatible. Also I didn't seem to find anywhere in the description about the SATA cables so I ordered some.... It comes with 2 and they are both SATA III capable. I had no issue with the drivers, didn't even need the disc. windows 7 x64 recognized the device and downloaded them.FOR PEEPS WITH WORRIES ABOUT POSSIBLE COMPATIBILITY PROBLEMS- This is my system setup and install and use went without any issues. (I doubt there should be any unless the pci-e slot you are trying to use is malfunctioning on the Mobo....)--Intel I5-2500K (Sandy) Processor--EVGA Z68 ATX DDR3 2133 Intel - LGA 1155 Motherboards 130-SB-E685-KR--EVGA GeForce GTX760 FTW with ACX Cooler 4GB GDDR5 256Bit Dual-Link DVI-I DVI-D HDMI DP SLI Ready 04G-P4-3768-KR--2x--Kingston Technology HyperX 8 GB (2x4 GB Modules) 1600 MHz DDR3 Dual Channel Kit (PC3 12800) 240-Pin SDRAM KHX1600C9D3K2/8GX--Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64bit (Full)--Samsung Electronics 840 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5-Inch SATA III Single Unit Version Internal Solid State Drive MZ-7TE250BW--Western Digital 500GB and 1TB Blue HDD (7200rpm) SATA III---Pioneer Electronics USA 15x SATA Internal BD/DVD/CD Burner with 4 MB Buffer BDR-208DBK--Sony AD-7280S-0B 24x SATA Internal DVD+/-RW Drive (Black)I have swapped all my HDD's, SSD, and Optical drives to this adapter and ALL OF THEM WORK on ALL SATA PORTS.SO to sum up..... This thing is an absolute STEAL if you are trying to make use of some pci-e 2.0 or 1.0x1 slots and would like some more SATA ports :)I actually may buy another one of these in case my motherboard SATAs decide to fry and then I won't have to get a new motherboard.I hope this helps you in your decision, if you have any questions or comments please ask!

This is a fantastic add on card, particularly for adding SATA III ports to otherwise good motherboards that only have SATA II, or simply have too few ports.My workstation (Win7 64 environment) and gaming system is fairly robust, consisting of:Socket 1366 EVGA X58 SLI LE motherboard (circa 2009)Intel Core i7 970 hexacore CPU12GB DDR3EVGA GTX 570Definitely not a slouch. What it was lacking in, was SATA III ports. I use an SSD on my boot drive, but its speed was being held back by SATA II. Having recently bought a SATA III 128GB OCZ Vertex 4 SSD, I wanted to appreciate the drive's very good performance, without plunking down a couple hundred dollars just for a SATA III motherboard for an outdated socket. Real world performance on the 128GB OCZ Vertex 4 was such that I could reasonably expect to see 450MB/s for sequential read/write speeds, with an optimal SATA 3 controller.Being fully cognizant that I am only spending a miniscule $17 on a budget brand card to add a couple SATA 3 ports, where there previously were none, I bought this with understanding that it would be unlikely for me to see the 450MB/s read/write performance that others were seeing as it were with more robust SATA 3 controllers. So I bought this IoCrest/Syba PCIE card. It delivered.Running several benchmarks with AS SSD, I tested the 128GB Sata III OCZ SSD as it performed with the onboard SATA II, versus this add on card's SATA III.Onboard SATA2- Read/Write average: 266/235 MB/sAdd-On budget SATA 3- Read/Write average: 371/364 MB/sGreat! Very respectable! This $17 card provided a nearly 50% increase in read/write performance over SATA 2, which exactly fits the bill for what I was looking for. As long as you are not expecting pinnacle performance from this, you can reasonably expect to see a decent speed boost if you are upgrading from SATA 2.There are some installation nuances that one needs to consider when installing this for bootable drives, that I think others who negatively rated this product may have not considered:-Set your BIOS SATA controllers to AHCI mode, not IDE. A lot of people forget to set this, as most motherboards default to IDE. IDE will artificially slow your drives and possibly create conflicts with this card.-The hardware/card should be installed first, without attaching any drives to it. This is so Windows can recognize the hardware and make the appropriate changes to the OS. Once booted into Windows, install the drivers (I went to the Syba website and downloaded the latest, rather than using those on the disk) and restart, insuring that the device is fully recognized. Failure to do this and you are almost guaranteed a blue screen.-Once you ensure that Windows recognizes this, turn off your computer and attach your boot drive to this card. Turn back on go back into your BIOS and make sure you set hard drive boot priority to this drive. Newer motherboards should have the ability to select and detect bootable add on cards. It should appear as "SCSI Add On Card" with your hard drive model listed next to it. Most consumer motherboards (Asus, Gigabyte, EVGA, Foxconn, etc) will support this.!! -If you are using a prebuilt PC, such as from Dell, HP, etc, your BIOS is likely locked down, and this card will probably not work for you if you intend to use it for bootable drives. If you are in this category, you will most likely only be able to use this for secondary non-boot drives.Overall, I'm extremely satisfied with this product and have picked up a couple more of these cards, to increase the number of drives I could attach to various computers. Zero problems to report on 4 wildly different PCs.