SYBA SY-PEX40052 PCI-Express x1 Low Profile Ready SATA III (6.0Gb/s) HyperDuo SSD and SATA 6G HDD Controller Card

Pros: Does what it says. Will turn an SSD and a HHD into a hybrid drive

Cons: WILL NOT go up to 6gbps even in a 4x 2.0 slot as was recomended. Maxes out at 5gbps, and windows profiler is no better than running the drive strait to the motherboard (5.9)on a lower 3gb connection

Other Thoughts: I bought a board that had the higher slot available than 1x just to use this card, and come to find out the performance of the card is identical to that of plugging it into a 1x slot when it was plugged into a 2.0 4x slot.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Customer,

6Gbps in Microsofts standards is equal to 550mbps. They would not qualify it as a 5Gbps because accordign to the standards of 5GBps it is equal to 450 mbps.

The main detail is to confirm the drivers are installed properly.

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

Making affordable quality products is our goal. Our engineers will look into this matter. If it is a problem of our production design, we will improve it.

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

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

Regards, SYBA CST 05062013

Pros: cheap, not even worth an egg

Cons: But this controller isn't a raid controller in the conventional sense. It only works for a solid state disk and a conventional hard disk drive. I WILL NOT work for two hard disk drives. It should not be listed as a raid controller.

Other Thoughts: Newegg graciously refunded my restocking fee. I hope they remove this controller from the raid category so someone else won't be stuck with this white elephant.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Customer,

This is a RAID card.
It will work with two hard drives. This card can perform much better with one SSD and one hard drive.
Please give our technical support a call and we will help you to set the desired RAID level.

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

This card is backed by a hassle free warranty which will ensure a prompt replacement. You can fill out our convenient online RMA form, or you can contact us directly for live customer service.

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 03062013

Pros: Plugged in and detected my hard drives right away.
Windows had no problems detecting the drives and installing the drivers.

Cons: None so far.

Pros: Fast

Cons: The documentation is terse and extremely incomplete. The driver CD had the wrong driver. I had to use Google to find a correct driver files to download. Even with the correct driver files, I had to take my best guess on how to install them because the documentation was so bad. Fortunately I got it right and it worked. I almost returned the controller.

Other Thoughts: I would not recommend buying this controller unless they revised the documentation to be complete, readable and put the correct driver on the CD.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear customer,

We are in the precess of revising some of the more "illegable" user manuals. we are very sorry for the inconveanance and hope that it wll not affect your view of the product. thank you.

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

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.

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

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 01042013

Pros: Boot seamlessly. Easy configuration and setup.

Cons: Slower than motherboard SATA II

Other Thoughts: I have a Supermicro with 2 quad core Xeons in about a 3 year old system. The drive is an Intel SSD 520. Running benchmarks from the motherboard Intel AHCI SATAII controller and this card under Ubuntu 11.04 Natty, the built-in SATAII controller gives better performance.

That said, since I use UUIDs to identify my disk partitions, I plugged this into the MB, attached the drive and booted right up without a problem.

But as for SATA III, I just don't see it.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear customer,

Please make sure that your motherboard has PCI-e V2 slot. Some motherboards are based on PIC-e V1 specification, and V1 will not give you SATA III performance.

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.

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)

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 01042013

Pros: Works with PCI-E 1.0 slots (and also I think with PCI-E 2.0)
Options: RAID 0, RAID 1, Hyperduo Safe, Hyperduo Capacity
Can also be simply used as a SATA controller.

I paired a Seagate 1TB mechanical drive with this card and with a Kingston 120 GB SSD using the Hyperduo Safe option. The Safe option means all the data on the SSD is also mirrored on the mechanical hard drive. Thus, if the SSD should fail, all the data will still be safely stored on the mechanical drive.

I've noticed a marked improvement in system performance using this setup. It boots faster, and programs also load and exit faster than before. If your system seems slow and if the hard drive activity indicator light is constantly flashing, then this will probably help you.

Cons: None really.

Other Thoughts: The PCI-E 1.0 interface will limit the throughput to 2.5 Gb/s, so even though you have SATA III 6.0 Gb/s ports and hard disks the PCI-E interface will still be the bottleneck. If you have PCI-E 2.0 slots, this will be 5.0 Gb/s instead of only 2.5 Gb/s. I have the PCI-E 1.0 slots, but still I'm seeing a marked improvement in system performance.

You will need to be sure to backup all of your data prior to attempting the installation. Adding the drive to one of the arrays is almost certainly going to wipe it clean. Although the Hyperduo mode offered the option to keep the hard drive's current data intact, it wiped it nonetheless. Maybe if you do it through Windows instead of through the BIOS (CTRL+M on startup) it will retain your data, but I wouldn't risk it.

Also, when creating the Hyperduo array take care to notice where it says it is initializing and gives a completion percentage. Let it finish to 100% before exiting the BIOS and completing the bootup. Let it finish the initialization, and then restore your backups to the new virtual disk.

Pros: Inexpensive. Easy to install.

Cons: Doesn't perform as should.

Other Thoughts: I'm very knowledgeable regarding hardware, and I bought this card hoping to get a higher performance rating with this card. Using the Windows Index Score, I had 7.2 on my Hard Drive using built-in controllers and changing to the card it dropped to 6.8.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Customer,

Many users overlook an important factor on the PCI-e performance. Many of the old motherboard support on PCI-e Ver 1 specifications. In this case, an advanced card like this one will not offer any performance gain. And this is why your on board port can run faster.

Test the card on a newer motherboard with PCI-e Ver 2.0 specification and see for yourself.

Another important fact is that this card is designed for combination of SSD and HD. Connecting it to two regular HD will not offer the maximum performance. Please see user manual for more details.

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

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)

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 12062012

Pros: More from my earlier post. Buy this if:
You want 2 Sata3 ports that Win7 will recognize w/o drivers disk..
You want to speed up a magnetic drive without going raptors or RAID.
You want to get a speed upgrade without reloading windows.
You want storage capacity of normal HDs plus performance of SSDs.

Think Seagate Momentus XT hybrid but you choose the SSD size and magnetic drive.

Cons: Its not a RAID 0/1 card in the classic sense. Its HyperDuo. Marvell makes the controller chip so do your homework and checkout their website first to see its benefits and how it works.

Benefits of HyperDuo improve as you use it, not right away.

Other Thoughts: To use HyperDuo you will need a SSD, a normal HD and need to load the Marvell HyperDuo drivers for Windows. If you install the card and load marvell drivers before moving the sata cable off your mobo, you will not have to reload windows.

Not sure how TRIM works with this controller; I will need to do my own homework.

Or you can just use it as a cheap Sata3 2 port controller without RAID.

Pros: I bought a Samsung 830 series SSD recently which is a SATA 3 device. I put the SSD in my old MB which only supports SATA 2 and the SSD was only recognized as 1.5 GB/s capacity drive. The SSD worked quite well though, improved the Windows Experience Index from 5.9 to 7.8. I have few open PCI-Express x1 slots open in my MB so I decided to get this card to boost the performance of my new Samsung SSD to atleast close to its maximum potential. I ordered this card from newegg and received it in 2 days. Fast! Opened the card, installed it in one of the open PCI-E slot and plugged the SSD in. My BIOS recognized this card right away and also the Samsung 830, this time correctly as 6.0 GB/s capacity. The Windows Experience Index is now at a perfect 7.9!

Cons: None so far for my use.

Pros: Actually, none that I can site.

Cons: It just doesn't work.

Other Thoughts: This card is designed to create what SYBAUSA calls a HyperDuo setup for an SSD and HDD that will optimize performance between the two - I guess that it offloads the reserved system swap files to the HDD to preserve the SSD, maybe some other stuff too. I bought this card in order to set up a RAID 1 from a pair of 2T drives I also purchased. Prior to purchasing the card, I verified, with SYBAUSA, that it would do this for me. Unfortunately, it did not. During setup, the BIOS acts like it is working until it comes time to create the virtual disk, at which point the setup locks up: requiring a reboot. Eventually Tech Support recommended I set the RAID up as the HyperDuo. This didn't work because the card is smart enough to look for an SSD and therefore also failed the setup. So, I tried to setup the HyperDuo functionality with an SDD I also purchased and an HDD. That didn't work either because it didn't see the SSD - even though I made sure that all of the connections were solid. Note that all of the drives I attached to this card have been - and continue to be - usable through the sata connections on the motherboard.

I've spent many hours trying to get this card to work and have decided that it just isn't worth any more of my time. I don't think it is broken in some way, I just think its design is defective.

I'm sending it back for a refund and now have to start over trying to find a replacement.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Customer,

We do apologize for what happened. And we are sorry if our technical support team did not offer you quick and helpful support.

It is our goal to provide quality, fast, and accurate support to all customers, and again we apologize for the inconvenience. Because of this we have equipped our testing bench with SSD and new motherboards. Hopefuly we will be able to offer you better support next time.

This proudct is based on a well known chipset manufacturer. The product has been tested and works well. But, we are working on a better step by step user manual for customers to download straight from our website.

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 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)

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 10182012