SYBA SD-SATA150R PCI 2.2 SATA Controller Card

Pros: Does what it's supposed to. Easy to flash. Great way to add a hard drive to the system when I ran out of connections on the motherboard.

Cons: None.

Other Thoughts: This card fit the bill for what I needed at a good price.

Pros: Worked great to find an sata hard drive I added as a slave.

Cons: Instructions should say that you should install the drivers off the CD First before you install in PCI

Other Thoughts: Note: Install the drivers off the CD before installing in a pci slot. Otherwise you will get a screen stating that you have an unrecognized pci device.

Pros: None

Cons: DOA

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Customer,

Our products being DOA is unacceptable. However, there might be something you have have overlooked.

Please contact us before you conclude that the product is DOA.

Our technical support team is available to help 9am-5pm M-F. Feel free to contact us during those business hours at support@sybausa.com

We apologize for any issues that you are having. As you know we are more than happy to provide our customers with a hassle free exchange when a product is defective.

Thank you for purchasing one of our products, and for leaving us your valuable feedback. We value all positive and negative feedback.

Regards, SYBA CST 03152013

Pros: Purchased for my Intel based core i7 system to add a couple of additional SATA ports. I had my motherboard's sata ports filled and wanted to add another HDD for storage. I installed this card and plugged in my two optical drives, which opened up 2 onboard sata ports for HDD's. Great for optical drives which do not need a super fast transfer speed of HDD's. Not using RAID functions.

Cons: BIOS detected card just fine, but Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit opsys didn't! Installing driver was a manual clumsy procedure! Plowing through a generic driver CD to find the right driver was irritating to say the least! Luckily, I hit upon the right driver and windows then saw the card and the optical drives plugged into it.

Other Thoughts: So far so good, it's working. I read that there is a NON RAID driver that could be installed if not going to use that feature, but I don't know how to find or install it. Because there is a RAID driver, my bootup time has slowed due to the user input prompt during BIOS sequence to enter RAID config. Grrrr.

Pros: I apologize for making yet another review - I just had to add this I just discovered. I was worried this card would not find a new 1 TB WD hard drive that had a 64mb buffer - I usually buy 32mb drives. But it found the drive immediately once I popped it in. I like that they gave me even a cheezy SATA cable, so I didn';t have to drive down to the computer store once again. I wish they'd include a SATA power cable though. But none of this changes my opinion, these are great cards, better than ones I've spent more money on.

The Original machine I was adding this to was an Old Dell Dimention in the short tower - But it was a dead box - So I added it to an old Athlon box I had, and it showed me the drive instantly. This box was even older than the Dell box I was going to use. All in All, these cards are the best and cheapest solution for old MBs that have no bootable Sata. I've heard about so many users who have not been able to get their drives seen, I don't understand it - Because I've used WD's, Seagates, Samsungs, and even Maxtors and 've never had any trouble in the past or recently. I hope these users can figure out why this happens, because I have yet to have it happen to me- It if does, we'll need to know why.

I've used these for Windows 2000/XP/Vista and 7, and several versions of Ubuntu - And one particular version of OSx86. I've never tried any of these in a MAC, don't know if they will work in my G4 towers.

Cons: It's only SATA 1, but 1.5 is plenty for those old boards these are usually used to add SATA fucntion to. It only has 1 Internal sata slot, again, not a problem, I do like to use external SATA drives.

I've tried dozens of SATA add on cards, some VIA, some SiL, and all of the ones that work best are all SiL and this company, Syba, offers them for a very reasonable price. So my Cons are not that important, no SATA Power cable, Cheap Data connector. But as far as being able to set it up and go, thiese are the easisst cards.

Other Thoughts: I've read through all of the reviews where these cards did not work for one reason or other. Maybe the first few times I bought a Sata Add On card like this, I did have trouble with detection. This was usually all about the buffer size, as the manufacturers have been increasing this over the years. One of the first times I ever bought a SATA drive, it did not work on the motherboard, back then they used Promise Raid Controllers or Via Chipsets, and I have had those kinds of controllers always act picky with the drives they are able to see. But in recent years, it seems that the drive manufacturers and the controller manufacturers have some to some agreement on backward, and forward compatibility. If this is a trend, there the manufacturers are anticipating the needs of the users, then it is a good trend and I'd like to see it continue. As long as these cards are being made, I will always have uses for them- I never really use these to add more Sata slots, most new boards have at least six. If my purposes cannot be served with 6 Sata slots, then I'll just have to built more systems. For now, I appreciate that these are being made, they are always there when I need them.

Pros: Got this for a machine with one of those old MSI mb's that had two internal sata that could not boot from- it was not SiL- I've bought dozens of these cards over the years, always work great for the price. I've bought other Sata/Raid cards that were no good and were priced much higher. These have never given me any problem whatsoever, but for the fact that they don't last long. I never put these in elaborate machines running Ubuntu, even though I've always been able to get them to work with that OS no problem- I reserve these for Windows XP systems.

Cons: They simply don't last long, which is why I always stock up on these.

Other Thoughts: Simple solution to a common problem with non bootable SATA.

Pros: Works great although Windows 7 did require the drivers disk to install.

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: Had to put an Evercool Ram chip Heatsink on the Syba SD-SATA150R processor.

Dell Dimension 4600 specs
-Case: Dell Micro-ATX Mini Tower
-Motherboard: Dell Intel 865 chipset socket 478 Micro-ATX motherboard
-Processor: Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor supporting HT Technology 3.40 GHz, 512K Cache, 800 MHz FSB
-RAID Controller: SYBA SD-SATA150R PCI 2.2 SATA Controller Card
-Optical Reader Drive: LITE-ON Black 4X BD-ROM 8X DVD-ROM 32X CD-ROM SATA Internal 4X Blu-ray Reader Model iHOS104-06 - OEM
-Optical Writer Drive: LITE-ON 12X BD-R 2X BD-RE 16X DVD+R 12X DVD-RAM 8X BD-ROM 8MB Cache SATA H/H Internal BD Writer with Nero Essential IHBS312-98
-Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM001 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive x2
-Memory: PNY Optima 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Desktop Memory Model MD2048KD1-400 x2
-Power Supply: Antec BP550 Plus 550W Continuous Power ATX12V V2.2 80 PLUS Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply
-Network Card: Intel PWLA8391GT PRO/1000 GT Desktop Adapter 10/ 100/ 1000Mbps PCI 1 x RJ45 - OEM
-Video Card: SAPPHIRE 100228L Radeon HD 3850 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 AGP 4X/8X HDCP Ready Video Card
-Sound Card: Creative 70SB073A00000 7.1 Channels 24-bit 96KHz PCI Interface Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer
-Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 32-bit - OEM

Pros: Works, Xp reconized without having to install anything.

Cons: None so far

Other Thoughts: using this on a relatively older pc that i have converted into my media server, noticed a huge speed increase using a sata HD vs. the old IDE HD that was in it before

Pros: Works great after you figure out how to install the drivers. I'm now running two DVD burners with excellent speed.

Cons: The instructions for Win XP installation lead you to believe that you must first install the PCI controller card and drivers and afterward connect the SATA drives. This is completely incorrect. You must connect at least one SATA drive to the controller card before Win XP will recognize the card and install the device drivers from the CD. It took me hours to finally figure this out.

Other Thoughts: This installation was in a Dell Optiplex GX270 running Win XP Sp3.

Pros: Works great under 32 or 64 bit in NON-raid mode- each disk will appear independently to the OS, no need for any configuration just install the latest SATARAID drivers from the SiliconImage website.

Drivers are nice- you can actually flash the firmware thru the driver interface(device manager>right-click SATA card>properties)

Stable- used in a security DVR where the disks are writing 24x7 and I've never had an issue.

Cons: none yet...

Other Thoughts: If you are not using RAID functions you can still use the standard SATARAID bios and drivers without issues, but you also have the option of flashing it with a leaner BASE bios which removes the RAID features completely.

After you flash the BASE bios, you can use the non-raid BASE drivers, the card then appears in Device Manager as "SATALink" instead of "SATARaid". The BASE driver is almost 50% smaller than the RAID driver, and less lines of code generally means less chance of bugs...not saying the RAID driver is buggy...as i've never tried it.

See SiliconImage site for latest drivers/bios.