SYBA SY-PCI40010 PCI SATA II (3.0Gb/s) 4 Port RAID 0/1/5/10 JBOD Card

Pros: I wanted to add a RAID10 to my WHS2011, and this seemed to offer good reviews and an inexpensive option. Installed well the first time....

Cons: I installed the OS from scratch again as I didnt have much on the server to begin with, and one stick of RAM was bad, so I started again. The RAID drivers were installed from the website, and rebooted, then it caught some updated drivers, then rebooted. Once all 4 ports were populated with 2TB drives and setup the RAID in the card BIOS, it would come up in windows only after I set the HDD boot sequence to look at my primary HDD instead of this array. But that was a MB/BIOS setting. Once in the OS, the drives were populated as two mirrored 1.8TB drives, which I could tell Windows to stripe and give me the RAID10.

Reboot, and nothing. Reset BIOS, clear RAID10 array and try again. Nothing. So I try again from scratch, and this time after all updates and patching, it is shows up as a 3.7TB drive. I check for updates, patch and it all looks good. Then I start to populate the array with 30GB of movies. Within 1 hour, it froze, and rebooted into a loop and when I try to boot up fully, I constantly get bluescreens. I have already wasted too much time with this thing, that I will just take another route.

Other Thoughts: All drives in the array passed all SMART tests and have functioned perfectly for the past month without the RAID card.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Customer,

Users who use RAID usually have their OS installed onto a separate drive and have their RAID array put together separately.

There is currently no driver support for WHS2011 for this product because WHS2011 uses Server 2008 and XP drivers.

The scenario that you created caused BSOD beacuse of the incompatibility of a stable driver.

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

We are more than happy to provide all of our customers with a prompt exchange whenever a product becomes defective.

SYBA offers an online RMA form, the user can easily fill out the form and submit it for a quick RMA return and exchange. It is SYBA's policy to answer all customer inquiries within 24 hours (M-F)

Thank you for purchasing one of our products, and for leaving us your valuable feedback.

Regards, SYBA CST 06122013

Pros: Installed flawlessly, added lots of storage to older server, good support, 3-year Warranty

Cons: None significant for intended purpose

Other Thoughts: I was able to install two of these cards in an older server (motherboard is an Intel L440GX+) and create an 8TB volume that is functionally a RAID 1 array - under Windows 2000 no less. Although no single array can be more than 2.3TB, I created four 2TB RAID 1 arrays (2 on each card, using 2TB Western Digital Green Drives) and then created a striped volume in Windows Disk Manager utilizing all four, for a total of 8TB.

I didn't have a single issue with installation - Windows recognized the cards, asked for the drivers and I pointed it to the provided CD. There was no trouble with Windows recognizing the four arrays and creating the striped volume, and it formatted the full 8TB in a few hours.

Note that I did not attempt to create a bootable volume - I don't believe that would be possible in this scenario, as Windows needs to be running in the first place in order to create the striped volume. But theoretically one could use the first 2TB array as the boot drive (that is, install a clean copy of Windows), and then create a second volume utilizing the remaining drives.

As some have noted, the card isn't particularly speedy, but that's to be expected from the older PCI bus. I did install the cards in 66Mhz slots (as opposed to 33Mhz). A quick test showed throughput of up to 45 MB/sec write / 225MB/sec read on large files (smaller files significantly slower).

I contacted Tech Support (via their website) prior to purchase, and they responded within an hour or two with accurate (and polite!) information. When I asked a couple of follow-up questions, the response was within minutes. They did (properly) warn about attempting to install two cards and so many drives into the server, due to the power requirements and potential system resource usage, but I previously had an ATA RAID setup with 8 drives, so had already installed a robust power supply and maxed out the RAM, so there were no issues.

I will note that I had tried a couple of other somewhat cheaper cards that purported to have the same functionality, but gave me nothing but problems. This was the only card I tried that did not give me a single issue, even with the limits I pushed it to. (Hint: Stay away from the ones here with a red PCB.)

Add to everything the three-year warranty, along with the surprisingly low cost, and it's hard to see how one could do better elsewhere.

Pros: Versatile card for adding host based SATA ports. Highly compatible. Very easy setup.

Cons: Not a high performer. For grins hooked up SSD's and benched it. 105MBps peak throughput which is pretty good considering PCI bus limitations.

Other Thoughts: Great for adding SATA ports to older or newer systems. It's host based RAID is not the ultimate,, but can get you basics,

Pros: Low cost. Easy to use. Plug and play with Fedora, I didn't have to do anything. Easily installed in Win 7 with drivers downloaded from Syba's website. Using it as non-RAID at this time, but eventually be adding two more HD as RAID 1, we shall see how it performs then.

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: As most of advised, chunk the CD driver that comes with card and download the latest from Syba's website.

Pros: Plug and play, no additional drivers, Win7 and XP64 compatible. Have ran one for over a year on a 24/7 machine without a hitch. Ran another with drives as sata and raid config. Control panel is typical for users with raid setup experience...just learn the setup and don't rush configuring disks. Most non-os setups don't hold your hand while you build. Great little card for the money, buying more for another build. Cheap even if I get a dud. Beats a $300+ buy for simple builds.

Cons: none

Other Thoughts: Asus M4A78T-e
AMD 955 Black 3.1GHz (Stock)
8Gb Gskill DDR3 1333 10666
Asus EN8400GS silent
Half a dozen HD's
Window's 7, XP64 dual boot.

Pros: none

Cons: While trying to use the raid card with my Freenas 8 OS I can read that it gets time outs on the 4 3TB drive I just bought from you guys, I tested the drives with GW scan and they are fine. I then plugged them into a seprate raid can and again work fine. This card is able to be seen by my OS but the drives get many errors when you try to use it. I would like a refund and try to find a better raid card

Other Thoughts: going to be out cost of shipping to return it. Will just got to local tech store to buy replacment.

update: got the sabrent sata pci card and worked fine.....

Pros: Works fine for what I'm using it for

Cons: Install is pretty wonky, adds time to reboot

Other Thoughts: Running Windows 7 Ultimate x64 I simply needed to add a few more internal SATA headers to my computer for additional hard drive connections for feeding my home network with XBMC media.

The install process is a little wonky, as you need to point to the drivers through the device manager in Windows because the Windows auto finder simply doesn't work for this.

The driver can be found on the Syba website here

http://www.sybausa.com/productInfo.php?iid=530

After getting everything setup and configured for JBOD (which was simple, there was no manual configuration required) the drives were plug and play. They mounted fine in Windows and I simply had to format the new drives and they were ready to go.

I'm running four of the 2TB WD Green drives as a simple JBOD and am getting a sustained transfer rate of ~50-70MB/second

Everything has been working great, I held my breath with this purchase due to mixed reviews but everything worked out fine. I'm writing this "review" to help alleviate any concerns others may have that are in a similar situation that I was.

Like I said, if you're comfortable using the device manager in Windows to install drivers, this card is a piece of cake and works flawlessly for JBOD.

Pros: Cheap

Cons: Unusable except for RAID config

Other Thoughts: After reading the other reviews here, I decided to contact Syba on 2 issues:

- Can a drive connected to this controller be used as a non-RAIDed boot device? According to Syba, NO. They state that at least one partition on the hard disk must be in a RAID config. They gave an example of how to fake out the RAID config so the drive would be bootable but not actually a RAIDED device but it was too complicated that they wouldn't even give me the steps.

- I notified them that their driver download file had no non-RAID drivers. They replied giving me a link to the SAME file download so obviously it still did not have any non-RAID drivers. The folder name tells you it's for RAID drivers. The "r" at the end of the filename tells you they're for RAID. If you look in their .inf file, you will see they say it is for use with RAID. Perhaps you can correctly guess which non-RAID driver to obtain from the Silicon Graphics web site.

I was looking for a PCI host controller card (not PCI-e) that gave me, at least, SATA-2 (3Gbps) support for my SATA-2 and SATA-3 hard disks with an old mobo that only supports SATA-1. I don't need RAID. I don't want RAID. I just want a PCI card for SATA-2 support of my SATA hard disks. This card won't work. Apparently Newegg doesn't think it's viable to carry this kind of PCI SATA-2 non-RAID controller card from which hard disks can be booted so will have to look elsewhere.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Customer,

This is a RAID card. The driver avaiable for download is a RAID driver. If RAID is not going to be used, simply ignore the RAID setup and this card will be just like a none RAID card.

If a none RAID driver is installed for this card, the card will not function at all.

You may bootup the system with a hard drive connected to it. However, you may have to reinstall your Windows operating system.

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

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

We are more than happy to provide all of our customers with a prompt exchange whenever a product becomes defective.

SYBA offers an on-line RMA form, the user can easily fill out the form and submit it for a quick RMA return and exchange. It is SYBA's policy to answer all customer inquiries within 24 hours (M-F)

Regards, SYBA CST 03222013

Pros: See previous review on 9/20/2012. Bought second and added to second PC (Intel based) and moved 32 GB SSD to it. Then added two 128 GB SSD's to original PC. Works like a charm on both. Good buy and easy install on both WinXP PC's using JBOD. XP recognized both cards so no xtra required.

Cons: None

Pros: Work perfect on Windows 7

Cons: While booting I see a message "this device is not recognized"
(or something like that) and I never seen this message before I installed this card... but still like I said above this card works perfect. ** 4 drives running off this card ** without issues.

I only took an egg because of this weird message while loading my computer.