Best Affordable 4-Port RAID Card I could find that works with HP ML110 G5 Server.(All Techies I can hear you laugh). HP ML110 G5 is an older generation but a great startup server offering which was offered 12+ Years ago.Some unbranded RAID Cards that I got from China (Ali*****) worked well but increased the CPU Usage by 60-70% - some firmware problem with very limited support.Those unbranded RAID cards even though worked were unusable.StarTech 4 Port PCIe SATA III cards not only detected all 4 of my 2 TB Hitachi, Seagate and WD Second Hand Hard Drives but also comfortably installed Windows Server 2016 Standard with no need of additional drivers. No CPU Usage overhead. Offers RAID o, RAID 1 and RAID 10.I chose RAID 10 with 3.84 TB of usable capacity. I ... MoreBest Affordable 4-Port RAID Card I could find that works with HP ML110 G5 Server.(All Techies I can hear you laugh). HP ML110 G5 is an older generation but a great startup server offering which was offered 12+ Years ago.Some unbranded RAID Cards that I got from China (Ali*****) worked well but increased the CPU Usage by 60-70% - some firmware problem with very limited support.Those unbranded RAID cards even though worked were unusable.StarTech 4 Port PCIe SATA III cards not only detected all 4 of my 2 TB Hitachi, Seagate and WD Second Hand Hard Drives but also comfortably installed Windows Server 2016 Standard with no need of additional drivers. No CPU Usage overhead. Offers RAID o, RAID 1 and RAID 10.I chose RAID 10 with 3.84 TB of usable capacity. I decided to split them up into Data and OS volumes which then automatically offered 2 x 1.5 TB volumes +750 GB for OS. 64K Cluster Size.Would highly recommend these cards.Better than the on-board RAID offering of HP Servers.StarTech is supported out of Auckland and has an NZ number to call.I am buying another one of these cards as a backup for my current RAID card.Not sure how long these good cards will still be around for.They might stop production based on feasibility. I hope not.

I ran into numerous issues, here's what I did: BSOD: Blue screen. Installed the card into my comp...

I ran into numerous issues, here's what I did: BSOD: Blue screen. Installed the card into my computer and installed the drivers (ASMedia) from the Startech.com website. Rebooted only to find everything was corrupted. I could not boot back into windows. Removed the card and still couldn't boot. Had to re-install windows from my backup partition. Solution: Run ASMedia driver install as Admin. When I got everything back up and running I figured what else do I have to lose at this point? I read the README file in the drivers folder and the Windows installation PDF to find out I needed to install this as Administrator. Reinstalled and no BSOD. Card not recognized in Device Manager / Windows 10: its your UEFI bios security protection. Once I disabled the security around ... MoreI ran into numerous issues, here's what I did: BSOD: Blue screen. Installed the card into my computer and installed the drivers (ASMedia) from the Startech.com website. Rebooted only to find everything was corrupted. I could not boot back into windows. Removed the card and still couldn't boot. Had to re-install windows from my backup partition. Solution: Run ASMedia driver install as Admin. When I got everything back up and running I figured what else do I have to lose at this point? I read the README file in the drivers folder and the Windows installation PDF to find out I needed to install this as Administrator. Reinstalled and no BSOD. Card not recognized in Device Manager / Windows 10: its your UEFI bios security protection. Once I disabled the security around my bios (I have a Dell Optiplex) it allows PCI cards to boot / be recognized as drives. If you're having other issues, see the other reviews. UPDATE: Looks like I got ahead of myself. After an extremely frustrating hours and hours of testing and research, it just won't work. The tips above only allowed me read-access. The card was working under the MS Sata drivers and never showed up as a "storage controller" or "SCSI controller". Ultimately I believe this comes down to if you're using UEFI bios on a 7th generation Intel or newer, it won't work unless you're willing to downgrade to legacy bios with MBR instead of UEFI and GPT. I haven't verified this but this is the last option and it involves a complete re-do of my entire setup.

Nothing but problems...

I purchased this card so that I could add 3 additional SATA hard disk drives to my PC, because my motherboard's 12 SATA ports are all being used.However, the card has caused me nothing but headaches. When I first installed the card, it appeared to be working fine because the hard drives all showed up during POST. It booted into Windows and the hard drives all appeared in My Computer and in disk manager...But that was only for less than 5 minutes. After that, the three hard drives vanished from My Computer and Disk Manager as though they had been unplugged. In an attempt to make the drives show up again, I restarted my computer, only to have it freeze during the Windows boot logo three times in a row.When I read that freezing during boot was a sign of a faulty ... MoreI purchased this card so that I could add 3 additional SATA hard disk drives to my PC, because my motherboard's 12 SATA ports are all being used.However, the card has caused me nothing but headaches. When I first installed the card, it appeared to be working fine because the hard drives all showed up during POST. It booted into Windows and the hard drives all appeared in My Computer and in disk manager...But that was only for less than 5 minutes. After that, the three hard drives vanished from My Computer and Disk Manager as though they had been unplugged. In an attempt to make the drives show up again, I restarted my computer, only to have it freeze during the Windows boot logo three times in a row.When I read that freezing during boot was a sign of a faulty card, I ordered a second card thinking that I must have just been unlucky with the first. But the second card has the exact same issues as the first! This means that either my luck is REALLY bad, or (more likely) most/all of these cards are defective or bad by design.The three hard drives work properly when attached via a SATA to USB adapter, or when attached directly to the motherboard with either of two brands of SATA cables, so the drives and cables aren't the problem. In my trial-and-error tests, I found that the only thing that differs between when the hard drives work and when they don't is when they are attached via this card.Therefore, it'd definitely be better to look elsewhere if you need an easy to use, stable, and reliably-working PCI-e to SATA card.

Overpriced and underperforms

I tried this with the following hardware: Windows 10, core i3-8500 with 120GB nVME system drive 2 ea Seagate Ironwolf 10TB HDD 1 ea Samsung 512GB SSD I setup a HyperDuo volume with the SSD and one of the Seagate HHDs (I let it initialize completely). The other Seagate HDD was connected to a SATA port on the motherboard. I copied files back and forth from the nVME system drive to both the HyperDuo enabled drive and the HDD connected to the motherboard. In all cases I had much better performance to the drive on the motherboard. As an example to copy an 8GB file from the nVME drive to the HyperDuo drive took 80 seconds! That same file copy took 34 seconds on the normal HDD. What’s strange is the HyperDuo benchmarks well in CrystalMark. But in real world use, it seems ... MoreI tried this with the following hardware: Windows 10, core i3-8500 with 120GB nVME system drive 2 ea Seagate Ironwolf 10TB HDD 1 ea Samsung 512GB SSD I setup a HyperDuo volume with the SSD and one of the Seagate HHDs (I let it initialize completely). The other Seagate HDD was connected to a SATA port on the motherboard. I copied files back and forth from the nVME system drive to both the HyperDuo enabled drive and the HDD connected to the motherboard. In all cases I had much better performance to the drive on the motherboard. As an example to copy an 8GB file from the nVME drive to the HyperDuo drive took 80 seconds! That same file copy took 34 seconds on the normal HDD. What’s strange is the HyperDuo benchmarks well in CrystalMark. But in real world use, it seems to fall flat. I wish I could return this.

Pros: - low cost RAID controller that works / easy to set up Cons - Well, I wouldn't say the data...

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 ... MorePros: - 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.

Super easy way to add drives to an old system or a new build. Used this on a new Ryzen 2600x Win1...

Super easy way to add drives to an old system or a new build. Used this on a new Ryzen 2600x Win10 system with 5 drives already in use by the motherboard. This particular card has 3 SATA ports and an mSATA slot. I'm using it for my BluRay drives which only run at 1.5Gb/s so perfect for not wasting the 6GB SATA III ports on the motherboard. This is basically a Marvell 9230 device, but Marvell's drivers are even older than Startech. The ones on Startech's site are v1.2.0.1041, but you can find v1.2.0.1049 if you use the googles. The utility (from Startech) to manage the device installs a little apache webserver on your computer (localhost:8845) which gives you a bit more diagnostic information. It's also worth noting that because this is a PCI-E 2.0 card, your ... MoreSuper easy way to add drives to an old system or a new build. Used this on a new Ryzen 2600x Win10 system with 5 drives already in use by the motherboard. This particular card has 3 SATA ports and an mSATA slot. I'm using it for my BluRay drives which only run at 1.5Gb/s so perfect for not wasting the 6GB SATA III ports on the motherboard. This is basically a Marvell 9230 device, but Marvell's drivers are even older than Startech. The ones on Startech's site are v1.2.0.1041, but you can find v1.2.0.1049 if you use the googles. The utility (from Startech) to manage the device installs a little apache webserver on your computer (localhost:8845) which gives you a bit more diagnostic information. It's also worth noting that because this is a PCI-E 2.0 card, your bandwidth will max out at 5Gb/s - so while perfect for slower devices like optical drives - for SSDs - the card will be your bottleneck (but still faster than any mechanical 7200rpm SATA drive). So if your SSD has a utility it may report that it's not connecting at full SATA3 port, but at a slower SATA2 port.

Using this to run my old Sans Digital TR8X-B tower. It's tough enough finding an eSATA controller...

Using this to run my old Sans Digital TR8X-B tower. It's tough enough finding an eSATA controller that handles a port multiplier on both ports. It's even tougher finding one that can also run in Windows Server 2012 r2. It's exponentially more difficult when you forget that some ASUS motherboards have a MIO slot that looks exactly like a PCI Express x1 slot! I completely forgot those MIO existed. SMH. Four hours of diagnostics: uninstalling/reinstalling drivers, fiddling with BIOS, flashing BIOS, fiddling with BIOS again. And, the whole time the controller card was sending power to both of the multipliers without registering itself. After I realized what I'd done, I slammed it into an x16 slot, windows booted and all eight drives lit up like a Christmas tree. If it ... MoreUsing this to run my old Sans Digital TR8X-B tower. It's tough enough finding an eSATA controller that handles a port multiplier on both ports. It's even tougher finding one that can also run in Windows Server 2012 r2. It's exponentially more difficult when you forget that some ASUS motherboards have a MIO slot that looks exactly like a PCI Express x1 slot! I completely forgot those MIO existed. SMH. Four hours of diagnostics: uninstalling/reinstalling drivers, fiddling with BIOS, flashing BIOS, fiddling with BIOS again. And, the whole time the controller card was sending power to both of the multipliers without registering itself. After I realized what I'd done, I slammed it into an x16 slot, windows booted and all eight drives lit up like a Christmas tree. If it weren't for IT_guy's review I'd probably have given up. Thanks, bud! Anyway, it's working great. I'm running it in a Transparent RAID instead of Storage Spaces (just a personal preference). I'll be upgrading to Server 2016 soon and we'll see how that goes. If I'm still pinching pennies when this stack runs out I'll probably get another one of these controller cards.

Worked better than Expected

1) Took a chance that this would work with WIN-10 Pro only lists compatibility up through WIN8, ..For a change I won and it was recognized by WIN-10. Saw some other threads on other forums about installing the card, boot, then install the drives and Re-boot, less confusing to WIndows I guess. 2) I am only using the RAID drives as File Storage ( two, 2TB-WD SSD Drives, about 1TB of actual data). Have no idea if I set this up a bootable RAID drive what would happen. 3) Been using RAID's as secondary backup for years and had a previous member of a RAID5 HDD array fail took forever to figure out what to do and rebuild that array. Not wanting to be "down" for an extended period again in the event of another failure I simulated a drive failure ( hot pulled the SATA cable) ... More1) Took a chance that this would work with WIN-10 Pro only lists compatibility up through WIN8, ..For a change I won and it was recognized by WIN-10. Saw some other threads on other forums about installing the card, boot, then install the drives and Re-boot, less confusing to WIndows I guess. 2) I am only using the RAID drives as File Storage ( two, 2TB-WD SSD Drives, about 1TB of actual data). Have no idea if I set this up a bootable RAID drive what would happen. 3) Been using RAID's as secondary backup for years and had a previous member of a RAID5 HDD array fail took forever to figure out what to do and rebuild that array. Not wanting to be "down" for an extended period again in the event of another failure I simulated a drive failure ( hot pulled the SATA cable) . A compulsory failure message popped up. After stumbling around a bit blind as there are no recovery instructions from STARTECH or Marvel on how to do an array rebuild finally figured out which icons to tap via the Marvel GUI. The rebuild of about 1TB of data took about 4 hours 4) Not entirely sure (ignorance on my part mostly) if the MARVEL GUI interface gives you software RAID array or a bios raid array, No real info in the docs. Works...so ignorance for the moment is indeed bliss.

Working OK- Windows 11 (Dell Precision T5610)

Firstly I suggest you disconnect all other SATA drives on first install as I suffered a corruption on my system boot SSD disk following installation of the card. It seems very unlikely this was an unlucky coincidence.I've not seen a CTRL-M during any boot though did not exhaustively adjust PC BIOS settings.I have UEFI mode and secure boot so perhaps this is a factor. With all other SATA disks disconnected I followed the instructions to create a Rufus DOS boot disk and the UEFI firmware installed OK.I then attached the SATA SSD boot disk and reinstalled Windows 11. Installed the drivers and the adapter was detected OK. I then connected a couple of 4TB SSD, these were detected OK. Used the MSU Windows software to create a mirror (RAID 1), no issues.I tried the ... MoreFirstly I suggest you disconnect all other SATA drives on first install as I suffered a corruption on my system boot SSD disk following installation of the card. It seems very unlikely this was an unlucky coincidence.I've not seen a CTRL-M during any boot though did not exhaustively adjust PC BIOS settings.I have UEFI mode and secure boot so perhaps this is a factor. With all other SATA disks disconnected I followed the instructions to create a Rufus DOS boot disk and the UEFI firmware installed OK.I then attached the SATA SSD boot disk and reinstalled Windows 11. Installed the drivers and the adapter was detected OK. I then connected a couple of 4TB SSD, these were detected OK. Used the MSU Windows software to create a mirror (RAID 1), no issues.I tried the Marvell CLI but didn't get far and the help is sparse on this though I'll find documentation with a search.The email alerting capability looks useful though with modern authentication becoming the norm the SMTP configuration provided will require a relay.

finally my server recognises all drives

I had a bit of an ordeal installing this device and thought I would have to send the sata expansion card back, ALWAYS read reviews before you buy something unless you don't mind losing the cash.I found that the BIOS was registering all of the drives that were plugged in, the issue was when I booted into the OS, the drives disappeared. I looked online and loads of people had the same issue and complained to startech. I nearly gave up but went back to it.the responses from startech to the reviews hinted that newer chipsets on motherboards might not be compatible, with this I went back to the bios to take a look around, I started disabling things that suggested to me that they could help, ended up being IOMMU grouping. It was set to Auto by default so I disabled it ... MoreI had a bit of an ordeal installing this device and thought I would have to send the sata expansion card back, ALWAYS read reviews before you buy something unless you don't mind losing the cash.I found that the BIOS was registering all of the drives that were plugged in, the issue was when I booted into the OS, the drives disappeared. I looked online and loads of people had the same issue and complained to startech. I nearly gave up but went back to it.the responses from startech to the reviews hinted that newer chipsets on motherboards might not be compatible, with this I went back to the bios to take a look around, I started disabling things that suggested to me that they could help, ended up being IOMMU grouping. It was set to Auto by default so I disabled it and the drives appeared once I booted!tldr, IOMMU is cool but doesnt always work.