MASSCOOL PCI Card, 4 internal SATA Model XWT-RC040

Pros: Works with NAS4free, Plug and play (did not install any drivers), Works with 2 TB well

Cons: One card had a bad SATA cable which caused a bunch of headaches, Sometimes during boot on one of my machines only one card shows up and I have to reboot it again and it's fine.

Other Thoughts: have two NAS4free Servers that are 1st generation P4. One runs all the time and the other is a back up (no RAID just JOBD). Each of these has two of these cards installed. They both have 6 x 2TB Seagates and work beautifully for streaming media. I wanted to know if they worked with larger drives but could not find any info all over the web so I wrote the Manufacturer and I got this response:
From : TechSupport <techsupport@fannerusa.com>
Subject : RE: Masscool PCI Card, 4 internal SATA Model XWT-RC040

It support up to 3TB.

Regards

Sent: Sunday, May 19, 2013 6:01 PM
To: techsupport@masscool.com
Subject: Masscool PCI Card, 4 internal SATA Model XWT-RC040

Does the XWT-RC040 card support 3 tb and 4 tb hard drives?

Thank you

Pros: 4 ports pci - old school

Cons: none

Pros: This is a PCI Card Serial ATA Rev. 1 with 4x SATA ports! Supports ATAPI devices great if you planning on adding DVD or any ROM Drives! Not to mention the price is just right... i bought Item#: N82E16815158090 for $120.00 and this card does more that the high priced one ( i have it sitting on my self collecting dust until i find a use for it).

Cons: I had a terrible time installing this card with the drivers supplied. I ended up finally installing the drivers and getting this card to read all 4 DVD/BR drives i added to my system after i downloaded the most recent and compatible drivers for WIN 7 64bit, going into the BIOS and resetting the PNP resource data. In the end this card is working just fine and im burning DVDS 5 at a time with 4 ROMs on this card and 1 on my mother board... also this package only come with 2 SATA cables... you would think if you selling a 4x SATA card you would include enough cables for 4 devices...

Other Thoughts: Don't let my installation stor turn you away from buying this card since i have a complicated and maxed out system you might find yourself installing the drivers just fine.

Pros: added four sata slots, no loss of speed.

Cons: can't get the raid load screen to not show up. only lasts a few seconds, but is really killing the bonus time my raptor may or may not be getting from the 10k rpm.

Pros: Used in RAID 1 on old P4 3.0 for media storage. OS wa on a ATA drive, used this to put two 320gb sata drives in raid 1.

Cons: Didn't install itself.

Other Thoughts: Installed card, then installled drivers from windows. The hooked up Hdd's and was prompted to set up raid on restart. Easy Set up, working great.

Pros: NOT WORTH THE HASSLE TO GET IT TO WORK WITH WIN 7

Cons: ALL

Other Thoughts: PAY A LITTLE MORE

Pros: -easy to install and attach secondary drives to
-hot swaps like a boss

Cons: -difficult to get booting from
-RAID is extremely slow, maxing out at around 90 MB/s

Other Thoughts: Overall I don't regret purchasing this card because it does everything I needed it to. I was disappointed at the RAID performance however -- if that's what you're looking for, look elsewhere.

Pros: I am running Ubuntu 8.04.3 on an old DFI LanParty board that I am using as a file server (my old gaming rig that was downgraded to server duty). I have two of these installed running 7 drives ranging from 500GB to 1.5TB. They required no special care in installation...simply plug them in, plug the drives in, and the OS reads the drives. Adding the second card was just as simple, as was adding more drives over the years.

Cons: Only supports SATA 1.

Other Thoughts: I have not attempted to run the boot disk from one of these, and I have not attempted to run a RAID setup on them. Only reason I wouldn't buy another is the lack of support for SATA 2 or 3.

Pros: Hadn't had a chance to find out.

Cons: On the card, where the chipset is soldered to the board, there is a major scratch. The connections are all mangled up. This should never have cleared QA. I am not risking putting it into my system! RMA'd it immediately. Also on the manual, it says SERELIAL instead of SERIAL!!! Gives you a warm cozy feeling, right!

Other Thoughts: On hindsight, might be better to get 2, 2 port cards rather than 1, 4 port card. Just to distribute the bandwidth more evenly.

Pros: Has four SATA ports, and comes with two SATA cables.

Cons: Mascool's support for this product is zero. Thank goodness the chipmaker (silicon image - 3114) has the software to make this card work.

No RAID setup instructions on how to configure the card's BIOS.

No instructions on whether the drives attached to this card must be RAID or not. After messing with it, it would seem that drives attached to this card can be used in a non-RAID configuration without any BIOS setup.

Mascool needs to be forthcoming on what this card WON'T do on their website. Limitations are far more critical to us folks who are trying keep old computers running. Thanks to Newegg for giving us a forum here to possibly list some of the limitations we're all finding in the field.

Other Thoughts: Working on an industrial computer with an ASUS P5A motherboard running Windows 2000 Professional, I needed a way to expand the storage capacity since the P5A BIOS won't read drives larger than 137GB. I'd hoped to just ditch the motherboard's on-board IDE controller entirely and just run two SATA drives off this card, including booting from one of them.

The P5A won't boot unless you are using the RAID 5.4.0.3 BIOS. Any other BIOS version causes the P5A system to hang during BIOS POST. Flashing the card's BIOS requires a drive to be attached to the card (dumb). I was never able to get the P5A to boot from a drive connected to this card despite the P5A having a SCSI setting in its BIOS BOOT SETUP, it would always report NO BOOT DISK PRESS A KEY so I ended up buying a new 80GB IDE drive to house the operating system and allocating the storage to two 75GB SATA drives attached to the card.