SATA Card 4 Port

I ran out of SATA ports on my motherboard but wanted to add two more drives to my raid array. This card popped in quickly, was instantly recognized, and started working with Ubuntu 24.04 and mdadm without any hassle whatsoever. The only con I've found so far is that there's a blue LED on the card that flashes for IO operations. I haven't found a way to turn that off yet. So far I'm very happy with this card. We'll see how long it holds up.

I bought a Samsung SSD to replace my main mechanical hard disk and ignored posts talking about issues with the AMD SATA Controller, because this seems silly that a SSD would have issues in this manner. Unfortunately, I had those problems and was simply living with the SSD performing below expectations with some minor stability issues because even with these issues, the system was much faster than the mechanical hard disk.After a recent Windows 10 update, however, the flakiness got worse with the system freezing for 60 seconds with the SSD stuck at 100%. I never blue screened, but this was unnerving. I was ready to throw in the towel, because I was unable to update the SSD's firmware, so I considered returning the Samsung SSD or even upgrading to an Intel motherboard which seemed extreme.Enter the $25 solution!I bought this SATA card after reading some encouraging reviews and happy to report this card not only solved my stability problems, but overall system performance sky rocketed with night and day benchmarks, the ability to use AHCI fully, enable RAPID mode which was not possible before and upgrading the SSD firmware without drama.Only word of caution is the supplied cables do not "snap into place" easily and a little short, but still a nice add if you need the cables. My case LED for HD activity no longer functions, but I can live with that.The SATA card easily booted Windows after making the appropriate drive the boot drive in my BIOS. Do not get freaked out by the "Boot Manager Missing" message and check the BIOS for boot order.

I originally wrote this review some time back ( a couple years maybe? Not sure), and my original reivew stands as-is for a simple PC class machine. Go to the end to see the differences for a somewhat larger machine needing support for more than 2 drives per card. ORIGINAL REVIEW FOLLOWS BELOW. Look for word "*CAVEAT" near the end for the update.Recently the nic in my wife's older Win 7 box died and I needed a replacement. This was a simple drop-it-in-the-box-and-forget-it card, and it works perfectly. The best surprise of all is NO surprises. The card swapping out and bringing up the new card may have taken as much as 10 minutes (including going to the kitchen for a cup of coffee.This one was so easy that I suspect my Airedale could have swapped it out.Definitely recommended (for a simple machine as described here).*CAVEAT*I don't run windows on any of my work machines - the PC-based boxes run linux (primarily redhat and fedora), and are somewhat "larger" in that they have more memory and are used to do things which I wouldn't try to attempt on a windows box. (We're doing high-speed number crunching that we used to do on Crays on these machines, causing 0a heavier load than the most taxing video game does ... or so I expect.)I had a problem requiring the local storage of up to 24 TB of data on a local machine (why? don't ask.) Actually that situation for multiple machines. And my boss decided that we should be able to do solve the problem for a cost as close to "next-to-nothing" as possible. So as cost was an issue my first idea was to try these low-cost cards. So we got a 4 of them and added them to the 4 machines we were using, and began some simple testing (for proof-of-concept). On day 1 we discovered that when these cardss are loaded down with 4 large, fast drives doing non-stop high-speed data storage and retrieval, problems appeared. The primary one was the card would suddenly fail to recognize one or more of the 4 drives on it, so these were out. Insted we used a relatively-expensive card which could reliably handle the storage and the high-speed data-transfer load, etc., but it cost *considerably* more than these. So while these appear to wok well with not more than 2 drives (in a high-load situation) 4 was just outside its scope.My original recommendation for these cards on "normal" machines not making continual insane/gargantuan data transfers still stands. But for something in the "heavy-duty" manipulation arena, the don't quite handle the problem and with their relatively inexpensive cost I don't think anyone should expect them to.