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.

No fuss Linux RAID. Forget MDADM and MB driver software RAID junk. Install disks, install this StarTech.com 4 Port PCI Express RAID Controller, on boot setup controller config and one-and-done done. Using Ubuntu 22.04 and the OS recognized RAID drive no problem.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nutze den Controller für ein RAID 0 aus 4x 1TB Western Digital Blue der rein für Spiele gedacht ist. Verwendet wird dieser von einem System mit Windows 7 und 10 auf 2 verschiedenen SSDs, der Zugriff von den beiden Systemen klappt ohne Probleme. Die Einrichtung findet über das BIOS des Controllers statt, welches beim Systemstart über STRG + M aufgerufen wird. Die Formatierung der neuen Partition über den Windows Festplattenmanager verlief ohne Probleme.