SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8 64-bit PCI-X133MHz SATA II (3.0Gb/s) Controller Card

Pros: Works with Server 2008, 2008 R2 and 2012! Does not conflict with onboard RAID or SATA.

Cons: Software only RAID, so it's limited to RAID levels 0/1/5.
PCI-X

Other Thoughts: I was having a tough time trying to get an Adaptec or LSI PCI-e RAID adapters to work on my new 2012 build. Both cards were a few years old, but I wanted H/W RAID and onboard memory. Neither of these cards played well with my onboard SATA. After 2 days of mucking around, I remembered I had this old card in inventory. Plugged it in and BAM! (after I loaded the Sonnet Tempo SATA Gen2 PCI-X adapter driver). Performance isn't as good as a full H/W RAID solution, but I was able to get the capacity I was looking for.

Pros: Worked right out of the box without any configuration hassles. Windows 7 doesn't have a driver for this card so I had to load it from the driver CD. After that it was smooth sailing installing Windows and configuring the applications on the machine.

The controller being PCI-X really makes a difference over PCI. Even with a single drive, performance is way better since you aren't bottlenecked to 133 MB/s of a regular PCI slot.

Cons: No hardware RAID support, but for this price with this many SATA ports I really can't complain. I think the only issue I had was the SATA connectors aren't secured to the card very well and require you hold the connector while plugging the drives in.

Other Thoughts: I bought this controller, along with a Western Digital Red 1 TB drive to breathe a few years of additional life into an aging Dell Precision 650 WS for a customer. It was pressed into service as a security DVR for IP cameras and is performing the task stellarly.

The customer is happy they saved money over buying a whole new server and I'm happy that it wasn't a huge headache to do, it was a win-win situation.

Pros: 8 ports, very cheap. good support in solaris/OI because the chipset was used by sun in storage appliances (x4500 i think?)

Cons: at least on the motherboards i've used, the pci-x bandwidth is a really serious bottleneck.

i found the linux drivers to be buggy. IIRC the device architecture split the 8 ports into two groups. there was a bug that would reset channels if you didn't have ports from both halves populated. there were other problems, one of them caused some data loss for me. this was maybe 3 or 4 years ago. switched to solaris.

Other Thoughts: with the 15 spindles i have attached to two of these, with an infiniband card on the same bus, i would see about a 4x throughput improvement just by switching to pci-e

Pros: I have this card sitting in my openmediavault server powered by ASUS AT5NM10-I mobo. The card runs great in a non PCI-X (32bit) slot no questions asked. Just plug and play. It will run slower in a 32bit slot but as for me just to serve up files I do not notice it. Runs great with MDRAID 5. Also the card is plug and play with Debian. Great buy for a home server.

Cons: None really. A tad long and could see where it could be awkward to install on some rigs. Not a con though. A bit bendy under tension.

Other Thoughts: Be careful, this card is very flexible if its inserted into a 32bit slot. The weight and tension of the sata cables can make the card sag. Be sure the cables are supported or suspened to take the tension off the card.

Pros: I bought this card in order to expand the amount of HDDs I could have in my case. Now I no longer have an issue with SATA ports, I ran out of power cables lol.

- Easy install (works in a PCI Slot)
- Comes with SATA cables! (darn good value)
- Works! (this I must explain more)

Cons: Install was both easy and not so easy. It is very easy to put into the computer and hook up, but I found getting it to work to intially be a chore. However, after I got it to work, I've never had an issue since and I don't even need to install drivers after each format, the drives just appear after updates finish.

Other Thoughts: Compare to value and costs, this is a dang good product and I am completely satified that I made a good choice. I wish I were better at working the hardware for the initial install, but it has worked perfectly since.

Pros: A 64bit PCI-X SATA drive board, will function in a standard 32bit PCI slot. Drivers preloaded by Windows Home Server 2011, nothing else to add. Six SATA drives plugged in and recognized after restart. Took me less than 5 minutes to plug in.

Cons: Not compatable with a PCI-e slot. Entirely different animal. Make sure you have at least a free PCI slot.

Other Thoughts: A great solution to extend limited numbers of PCI slots to support multiple SATA drives for a killer consumer-level server.

Pros: *Adds 8 SATA-II Ports to you're PCI-X (133Mhz) Equipped Server.
*Has pretty LEDs for Drive/Activity (With Pin-outs for added LEDs!)
*Works with Ubuntu Server 10.04.4 x86
*100+ MB/s to SATA-II Drives
*Option for low-profile
*Software RAID or JBOD
*Server is now 20% "Cooler"

Took a bit of working to get it to show up (My BIOS was hiding the card's BIOS screen), but got it installed and was 100% plug-and-play for my OS (Didn't install a single thing!)

Right now i am running 4x SATA/SATA-II drives in a JBOD configuration (soon to be 8x!).

I am currently running this in my home server, which has the duties of backups, streaming music/video, A TeamSpeak 3 server, and a minecraft server (Just to name a few). So far i have had no problems and it looks to be a great little card for this type of thing.

Cons: The ONLY thing i don't like is that the SATA ports on the back are upside-down. So it makes it a bit difficult to wire-tie the cables together, but even knowing that i would still buy 100 more if i had the money :)

Other Thoughts: My motherboard isn't the newest thing on the block (Intel SE7501BR2), but this card works great and adds the much needed SATA ports to this board. I get around 100MB/s transfer over Gigabit using SAMBA, which puts my 42MB/s i got with my other to shame.

If you're looking for a PCI-X RAID/JBOD card with 8 SATA-II ports, look no further. This is the best (and only) PCI-X SATA-II card with 8 ports for under $100.

Pros: 8 extra sata ports for $100, nothing else compares in this price range. Comes with 8 SATA cables.

Cons: Difficult Windows 7 Professional compatibility and driver support.

Other Thoughts: I try to choose my products wisely. This card was going into a custom build NAS (for a business) with six 3TB hard drives (storage RAID 5) and two 500GB hard drives (OS RAID 1). I have a mobo with six sata ports and RAID 5 functionality built in. I used this card to support the RAID 1 (configured through Windows) with two hard drives. I was able to successfully install Windows 7 Professional by first plugging the 500GB drive directly into the mobo (removing all 3TB drives). I initially used the included driver from SuperMicro. However, since it is unsigned Windows wouldn't allow it to work. Then I used the Sonnet driver mentioned in previous reviews. I moved the boot disk over to the RAID card and experienced EXTREMELY slow, unusable performance and constant freezing in Windows. I then downloaded and installed this driver (ftp://ftp.supermicro.com/driver/SATA/Adaptec_Marvell_H2/Windows/8_Ports/WIN03_64.zip) which works much, much better! I was able to complete the NAS.

Pros: The card works as advertised. I started with a single card in a Supermicro motherboard several years ago. I now have two cards in that server with 8 drives on each. I have been running Linux RAID arrays on them 24/7. I currently have 3 RAID arrays running across both cards (drives are spread across with no regard for card-array organization). I have run RAID 0,5, and 6 (all at the same time currently). I had no issues with Ubuntu Server 9.04 or Debian 6. In testing i have achieved over 500MB/sec from an array.

Cons: Not PCIe... But I Built the server with this card in mind so I have 4 PCI-X slots with a core 2 quad.

Other Thoughts: There was an issues with the linux driver for the Marvell controller in the linux kernel years ago which caused them to lock up constantly. I believe it was fixed in 2008 or 2009 and I know that Ubuntu 9.04 worked fine.

Pros: In theory a great way to update older MBs to SATA drives.

Cons: I have an old Supermicro X5DAL-G MB with dual xeon procs and a couple PCI-X slots that had been flawless for years until I decided to upgrade it with this card. After that I had numerous resets and data corruption. I'm rebuilding the server with a new MB, proc, memory and on-board SATA.

Other Thoughts: I have, up until now been a big Supermicro booster but this device and poor tech support has made me re-evaluate if I will buy any more Supermicro products.