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 purchased this controller along with a pair of 3 TB WD Hard Drives to upgrade the built in RAID Controller on my 4 year old MSI Mother Board. I had intended to use it to replace the built in controller but discovered that the BIOS on my mother board would not support booting from hard drives larger than 2 TB. Drives larger than 2 TB under Windows 7 require a BIOS that supports UEFI in order to take full advantage of the drive's capacity. So instead, I am booting from my original RAID controller and my original drives and using the StarTech controller and the new 3 TB drives for additional high speed storage in a RAID 0 configuration. The controller was recognized by Windows 7 and worked fine with the standard Windows 7 Drivers. I was pleased that the StarTech was compatible with the build in RAID controller. I had tried another controller but found that it wasn't compatible with the built in controller. The only problem that I encountered was with the driver that I downloaded from the StarTech site which I installed to "upgrade" the Windows driver. When I tried to run Picasa, after installing the StarTech dirver, Windows crashed. Very strange! I went back to the Windows driver which solved the problem. I highly recommend the StarTech controller. It is compatible with Windows 7 and my MSI Motherboard and has excellent performance.

I bought this controller 1st time in 2019, and after that I had some issues with it. I have a RAID1 array of 2 SATA drives 4 TB each. From the installation, it seemed to be working OK, but in a couple of weeks the array lost the integrity, so I had to reconfigure and sync it again to fix the problem. It continued working OK, but in a couple of weeks, the same issue happened again. After some research, I found that apparently, the firmware was not of the latest available version. So I found the latest version (2.3.0.1078 at that time) online together with an appropriate updating utility and performed the update. That required to run the update process in old DOS mode, but it's not a problem for an advanced user. After the firmware update, the controller works stable up to now, and doesn't cause any problems. Hopefully, this controller model is now proposed for sale having the last stable firmware version. I gave 4 stars to this product just because of this firmware issue, but I repeat it's fixable by user.

This board worked great with my old motherboard and i7 Intel chip. However, after I have installed a new motherboard with a new i9 chip and Windows 10 Pro, the board created a ghost disk that always generates a Virtual Disk Manager error "The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error". I have removed the device and reinstalled the driver from StarTech multiple times and the ghost disk continues to appear and the system continues to display an error. I will have to purchase a new SATA card.

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.

It will not support HyperDuo from a Raid 1 Volume, only 1:1 with a physical drive. This is not a limitation in the card itself. I think it's just the way that hyperDuo tech works. Works OK Running MSI Z270 on Win10 x64 i7 using WD Gold 1TB Sata3 with a Samsung PRO SSD. Very Fast. Just wish there was a way to cache a Raid 1 mirror volume on the SSD using hyperDuo. That would satisfy both requirements (speed of SSD, but benefits of RAID 1 mirror).

Like other reviewers have reported, this thing failed with little warning. I set up RAID 10 (with help from a great chat with tech support), and it worked OK for a couple of weeks. Then one day, without me changing anything in hardware or software, it dropped a drive. Hmmmm. I rebuilt the array overnight (that worked fine), but in 2 days it dropped 2 drives while I was working on the PC. This time it refused to rebuild. But this time I removed it and am sending it back. I bought the High Point RocketRAID 640L as its successor, and the HighPoint product has worked flawlessly for over a month.

Pros: - low cost RAID controller that works / easy to set up Cons - 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 loosely Other Notes During 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.

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.

I bought this to hook up my 4 NAS drives, JBOD mode. The configuration was a bit tricky, but after installing the latest firmware and drivers, the card is able to work again on JBOD mode. After 8 months and my NAS is running smoothly 24/24 with no problem so far. Will update this comment if something happened later on.

per il momento ottima scheda, installata in uno slot PCIe X2 necessita lo scaricamento dei driver e aggiornamento FW dal sito del produttore, configurati 2 array da 2 HD ciascuno in RAID tramite l'opzione CTRL-M al boot del bios. Creati dischi GPT visti correttamente come SATA III, per ora funzionante e veloce nelle prestazioni

Fast, efficient service with an excellent product.

Fonctionne parfaitement plug and play, rien a dire de plus c'est du StarTech.

Todo muy vien, la targeta funciona muy vien, el envío muy a tiempo, recomiendo tanto al producto como al proveedor.