John Nolan
Reviewed in the United States on January 12, 2025
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.
Doguy
Reviewed in France on December 4, 2024
Fonctionne parfaitement plug and play, rien a dire de plus c'est du StarTech.
Semiramis
Reviewed in Italy on December 11, 2024
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
MOIGNET Olivier
Reviewed in France on November 24, 2024
J'ai pu ajouter mes 4 disques supplémentaires sous linux et créer mon raid sans aucun souciLa carte est reconnu du premier coup, que du bonheur
CCC
Reviewed in the United States on May 6, 2020
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.
Andrew
Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2019
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.
Rob
Reviewed in Canada on November 10, 2019
The 6 - SATA ports on my motherboard are full. I had a couple of older Hard Disk Drives that I wanted to add, and so I ordered this Startech Controller Card. Installation was a bit confusing at first because I assumed that it would just plug into one of the short PCIe slots on the motherboard (PCIe x1), but after some reading, it turns out that it has to be installed in a slot that supports PCIe x2, (as a minimum), or higher. That meant that I had to install it in one of my PCIe x16 (long) slots instead. Not a big deal once I figured that out. The good thing is, the two Hard Disks that I connected to it were immediately recognized by Windows 10 without need of any Drivers or farting around.
prospero
Reviewed in Germany on March 19, 2018
Habe den 4-Port Controller sowie den Msata-2Port-Controller von Startech in zwei verschiedenen PC`s mit Windows 10 verbaut. Folgende undokumentierte Features bieten diese Karten:- es können 2 unterschiedliche Raid1-Systeme eingerichtet werden bei 4 Platten, ich habe einmal ein System mit 2 x Raid1 mit 4 HDD's und einmal ein System mit 2x Raid1 mit 2 SSD und 2 HDD eingerichtet. Trim-Befehl wird unterstützt. Beim Booten gelangt man mit Str+M ins Controller Menü, wobei aber nicht alle Grafikkarten die Anzeige des Bootmenüs unterstützen. Der Bootvorgang der Computers wird kurz unterbrochen, so daß man fast glaubt, er hätte sich wieder ausgeschaltet. Diese Unterbrechung verzögert das Hochfahren des PC um einige Sekunden.- Die 4-Sata Steckplätze sind auf der Karte nicht genau gekennzeichnet, nur mit P1 und P2 obwohl intern die Ports mit 0-1-2-3 nummeriert werden.- Besonders komfortabel ist die Konfiguration unter Windows, die über einen Apache-Server läuft. (Download über die Startech-Hompage). Die Anmeldung erfolgt über das gleiche Kennwort wie die Windows Anmeldung. Hier können Raid- und Hyperduo-Systeme konfiguriert werden, Fehlermeldungen per E-Mail versendet werden und die Smart-Werte der Festplatten ausgelesen werden.- der Controller ist bootfähig, sowohl mit einzelnen Festplatten als auch mit Raid-Systemen, allerdings ist die Einstellung der Bootreihenfolge im Bios nicht ganz unproblematisch, nicht immer werden die Laufwerke und die Raid-Systeme im Bios angezeigt.- die Festplatten und Raid Systeme werden in der Taskleiste als auswerfbare Laufwerke angezeigt, ein Windows 10, bzw. Firmware-Fehler. Zur Behebung dieses Fehlers bitte nach "TreatasInternalPort Windows 10" googlen wie in einem Kommentar zuvor beschrieben. Zusätzlich kann es notwendig sein, den Marvell-Controller-Treiber im Gerätemanager unter Speichercontroller durch den Standard-Microsoft Speichercontrollertreiber zu ersetzen. Danach sollte das Problem behoben sein.- Wer seine wertvollen Daten diesem Controller in einem Raid1-System anvertraut, sollte trotzdem regelmäßig seine Daten sichern. Im Falle eines Defekts des Controllers sind nämlich alle Daten futsch. Die Raid-Festplatten, die vom Controller abgesteckt und auf einen freien Steckplatz des Mainboards angeschlossen werden, können von Windows nicht mehr gelesen werden, Windows zeigt sie als nicht zugeordneten Speicherplatz an und fordert auf, dieses Laufwerk zu initialisieren. Tut man dies, hat man nachher eine völlig neue Festplatte ohne den ganzen alten Ballast. Vorausschauende kaufen sich daher einen identischen Controller als Reserve und legen diesen für diesen "Worst Case" zurück, falls man nicht tausende von Euro für eine professionelle Datenrettung ausgeben will.- Zeigt der Controller oder die Festplatte einen Fehler an, läßt sich das Raid1 System nur wiederherstellen, wenn man die defekte Platte durch eine neue (oder unkonfigurierte) Platte ersetzt. Wenn das Raid1-System als "degraded" angezeigt wird, kann der Rebuild nur mit einer neuen Platte durchgeführt werden. Leider scheint der Controller relativ empfindlich auf Störungen der Datenkonsistenz zu reagieren, zickige Festplatten, schwankende Spannungsversorgung oder sonstige Störungen des Betriebs können leicht Fehlermeldungen und "degraded" Warnhinweise auslösen.-bin trotzdem bisher zufrieden, Preis-Leistungsverhältnis ist sehr gut. Neue Erfahrungen werden ggf. hier ergänzt.
Gregg T.
Reviewed in the United States on November 27, 2014
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.
Anonymous
Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2013
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.