Vantec 4 Channel, 2 mSATA, 2 SATA 6Gb/s PCIe RAID Card with HyperDuo UGT-MST644R

This is my 4th inexpensive RAID controller. The first 3 were either DOA, or came with drivers that wouldn't install. This one was surprisingly easy to install, easy to use and so far, hasn't had any problems.My setup:Windows XP/SP3 -- on a P4.3 x 2TB Seagate Barracuda LP in eSATA enclosures1 x 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 in eSATA enclosureI'm running Windows XP which has a 2TB Disk limit. Setting up a RAID5 with three 2TB drives requires that you setup two RAID5 groups (2TB each), and then concat them in XP. That gives you the full 4TB capacity... and RAID5 (awesome!)I purchased a separate internal-SATA to eSATA adapter because all my disks are in eSATA enclosures, and I don't have room or power in my P4 box. That adapter cost me $5.CONS:As far as I can tell, there is no way to get at the SMART data from the individual drives. I have SmartMonTools installed on my XP box to notify me via SMS if/when a drive experiences any sort of failure. These drives are SMART compatible, but the RAID controller doesn't give you an interface to retrieve the data, or a way for SmartMonTools to monitor the disks.The jumpers used to configure the external/internal ports are small and easy to loose.UPDATE (11/12/2011): OMG! I can't believe I paid so little for this card. I have a couple of things to add to my review. 1) I've been playing around in the RAID Controller GUI. It is so easy to add, delete, update, repair and do all the RAID admin things... right from the GUI. 2) The performance is through the roof! I was able to get 60% saturation on my GB Ethernet copying files via a Windows share. The bottle neck on that copy was actually the HDD on the client node.I think I need a second one of these!!!The internal-SATA to external-eSATA adapter was also a great investment. I can't believe how much faster my external drives are now that I've got them connected via eSATA instead of USB-2.0. I have 1 port on my RAID controller that isn't being used by the RAID-5 Volume Group... being that all the ports are Hot-Swappable and easily accepts my other SATA drives, it couldn't get any better.UPDATE (11/16/2011): OMG!!! In my original review posting, I indicate that you can't get the SMART data from the disks. Well... it turns out that you can get an application from SiliconImage (the chip MFG) that does exactly what I've got SmartMonTools setup to do -- monitor the health and notify me if there's an issue. Very easy to use... even easier than SmartMonTools.I had an unfortunate experience. One of my 2TB drives died. At first I thought it was the SATA card, or cable, or power supply... or something (it couldn't be the drive... it was only 12 days old). But.. it was the drive. It was dead. At the time that it died, I had no indication there was anything wrong. The RAID is on a box in my basement. I rarely ever sit in front of it, so I didn't see the little pop up saying "An Event Occurred." When I did finally sit in front of the box, I saw the pop up... and opened the RAID tool... to see that I only had 2 Disks in my RAID Group. I took the dead drive back to the store, got an exchange, and now my RAID Group is rebuilding.So... unlike other inexpensive RAID controllers I've used, when "An Event Occurs" it doesn't hang or kill the system. This RAID kept on working... and I continued to be able to do IO to it... and really hadn't noticed the degraded mode performance drop.The one thing I notice though... and I'm not sure how I feel about this.... the RAID controller GUI is telling me that it's going to take 23 hours to rebuild my RAID-5. I don't know how accurate that is, or if it's just a conservative estimate. But I would think that I could read the data from 3 2TB disks... and write the data back to those 3 2TB disks faster than 23 hours. I understand that the RAID controller doesn't know what parts of the disk are blank and therefore it has to read the entire 2TB for 2 of the disks... and calculate the parity. But Really?!? 23 hours?But... I have to say... so far, I'm liking this card!UPDATE (1-4-2012): It turns out that 23 hours wasn't a conservative estimate. In fact, it wasn't conservative at all... it actually took 37 hours to rebuild my RAID-5. Having said that... I'm not sure it's a problem, but simply a fact of life. While it's true that I wasn't able to get steller numbers when running a Disk IO benchmark while the RAID was being rebuilt... I really didn't see any performance issues doing my day-to-day work on the system. And... my benchmark scores after the RAID was rebuilt weren't too far off what they were when the RAID was being rebuilt. So... 23 or 37 hours... I guess I shouldn't care. After the horrifying experience of having one of my brand new 2TB drives fail, I was sure I would have an other failure soon.... so far, my drives have been spinning without any additional interrupts... and this RAID controller has proven to be a very smart purchase.

I bought this for an HTPC / media server. The box used to be a Windows Home Server 2011, but I recently switched to Windows 8.1 Pro (64-bit) to better repurpose it for sharing. The way you use this Vantec 4-channel 6-port card can be simple or it can be complex, but the included user's manual does a very good job of explaining it to you. Your options are really only 4 internal, 2 external, so keep in mind that limitation.The way it's supposed to work is, you install the software, shut the machine down, install the card, bring the machine back up, and from the boot-time level you can configure your RAID array (more on that in a moment). However, two notes:1) Out of curiosity, I decided to just hook up the card and some drives, boot up, and see what Plug & Play does. On Windows 8.1 Pro, it worked, finding the drivers, installing them, and then seeing four individual drives. From here, you could probably use Windows Storage Spaces to build your own soft array if you wanted to, but I decided to go it differently and use the boot-time setup. I installed the software and on reboot was able to press Ctrl + M to access the boot-time software.2) I don't think you could easily take an existing RAID array, connect its members to this card, and be ready to go - I think the assumption with a hard array is that for this controller, you need to build the array. It may be a different story for soft arrays; if you've had a different experience, let me know in the comments!When you open the boot-time software, it's fairly simple if you read the manual first. What they want you to do is select the disks that the controller sees--and when you continue, it creates a "Virtual Disk". The Virtual Disk is from there defined as the kind of array you want to build (0, 1, 5, etc.).What's really cool about the boot-time setup is that if you wanted to, you could build a hybrid array just like a professional datacenter. For example, you could have three spinning disks and an SSD, then make those your array. From there, you could either tell the system to use the SSD for caching high-demand data (and the spinning disks keep 'stale' data), which gives you a bit of redundancy because the high-access data exists in both places; or you could tell it that the high-demand files stay on the SSD and get moved to spinning disks if they go 'stale'. Either way, the controller manages this for you. If I were creating video I'd probably use this feature, but I just want to stream video, so a RAID 0 of four identical disks was just fine for me.If you want to put together 4 internal disks, this card makes a great way to use a variety of options (some reviewers here appear to be using it with JBOD as well). It's useful that you get 2 extra external ports, but you can also disable those if you're bandwidth-conscious. Either way, I liked the software, the fact that they included a decent manual, and so far it's been really easy to use and worked well for me.

This controller started out OK. Built a RAID 1 array with 2 HGST 3 TB hard drives. Transferred files and a couple of VM's to the array. Worked great for about 4 days then the Array failed. Neither drive was bad just that the Mirror broke. Checked disk manager and both disks were recognized. In File explorer though they had vastly different content. One drive had all of the content that was transferred but the other drive had hardly any data on it. Mind you these drives had over 4 days to fully sync and I heard no disk activity. I moved all of the data back off of the disks so I could rebuild the array. I deleted one of the arrays that was showing in the management software and freed up the disk. Then tried to rebuild the array. At that point the controller went missing from the management utility. Still showed in device management but the utility could no longer detect it. Rebooted and tried to connect to the controller during post. Locked up the computer. Stay very far away from this garbage. The price may be attractive but not worth the potential data loss. Oh, and it will install apache in order for you to manage the RAID controller. Garbage Garbage Garbage.