Rosewill RC-209-EX PCI 2.3, 32bit, 33/66Mhz SATA Controller Card

Pros: cheap. 4 sata OR 2 sata @ 2 esata Or 3&1 etc.

Cons: no freenas8 support

Other Thoughts: Bought for freenas8 rig. was unsupported. If i needed it for a regular build I'm sure it would have met my needs as I'm still working on SATA II speeds. It showed up in the boot sequence and saw all my disks. The card bios seemed intuative and ok for my needs. It's a shame It didn't work in freenas I really like Rosewill products. Their USB WIFI dongles are the best I've ever found and have native support in linux.

Pros: -works
-cheap

Cons: -not fast

Other Thoughts: I'm using this as an eSATA connector to a SANS Digital TowerRAID TR4UTBPN with 4 WDEARS20 drives configured as RAID5 in XenServer 6.1 and it works fine. I wouldn't call it fast but it gets about 70Mbps throughput to my Windows VMs which is about what I would expect from low end hardware.

Pros: Four SATA ports. Supported by Xubuntu Linux 12.10 out-of-the-box. Configured for internal use out-of-the-box. Included several cables.

Cons: Could have included 4 SATA cables and power cables.

Other Thoughts: Worked great in my older Linux system that only had PCI slots available. Connected a new ASUS dvd burner and two older SATA drives. All worked out-of-the-box. Appears to be a well-supported device under Linux. Running the two drives using LVM for backing up other drives as needed. Works great.

Pros: Cheap, 4 ports, uses up one of those old PCI slots I don't use much. Was able to boot from devices connected to it and set up a separate raid from my motherboard raid.

Cons: Too slow for even the cheapest budget drives - Reads and Writes are both capped at 80 MB/sec , when my slowest drive does 160. Even slower in RAID mode. Not having a setting to set drives in AHCI or IDE mode means you're going to have some trouble when booting though - it seems as if it is determined automatically.

Other Thoughts: Okay if you're just going to attach a DVD burner to it, but you don't need 4 SATA ports for 1 DVD burner.

Pros: Plug and Play in Linux

Cons: None noticed so far

Other Thoughts: I seem to never have enough hard drive space and extra SATA drives laying around. I expander my file server by another 1.5 TB on a legacy MB for less than $20. I haven't messed with RAID so I can't comment on that issue

Pros: Put the card in an open PCI slot, reboot and had 4 SATA ports.

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: I needed extra storage space and had some SATA drives laying around. The motherboard was fairly old and had no SATA ports. I put in the card and Ubuntu installed it with no issues. I will probably get a couple more,

Pros: Nice card to expand the number of hard drives in your computer

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: They tell you on Rosewell's site NOT to use green drives because of slower spin up when hibernating

Pros: Works perfectly with Windows 8 Storage Spaces, very inexpensive, uses PCI

Cons: Because of the nature of the interface speeds are going to be a lot slower then SATA normally would. Still if you're just looking to add drives in for mass storage it's a great option. It definitely plays HD movies without issue.

Other Thoughts: I bought this to hold a few drives that were going to be part of a Windows 8 storage space. The card installed perfectly, the storage spaces were easy to setup and everything is working fantastically. As I said before, speeds are a little slower then you'd get from a regular sata port but that's because it's running over an older technology so I can't fault the card and I knew this going in.

Pros: Inexpensive.
Fast for single disks
Mostly works

Cons: Poor RAID performance

Horrible RAID configuration interface. Array can only be created, status checked, or repaired from BIOS.

Hot spare capability doesn't work on RAID 5 arrays. Didn't test RAID 1 or 10.

If a RAID 5 member is lost, the whole array is immediately dismounted, even if a spare is assigned. Can only be remounted once missing member is replaced. RAID 5 specification allows for operation in degraded mode.

If a RAID 10 member is removed, then added back, the member is out of sync, however the BIOS will report it is OK. Unknown whether it will resync itself in this case, remains degraded, or remains out of sync. Only RAID 1 can be manually resync'd.

No indication of degraded RAID 1 or 10 array from Windows. A degraded RAID 5 array immediately dismounts.

Once a disk is configured in an array, it cannot be used as a bare disk again, even if the array is deleted. It must be configured as a 1 disk concatenation to be recognized by the OS.

Other Thoughts: Bench tests of each RAID configuration were performed using 4 WD 160GB disks I had laying around (model WD1600AAJS-75M0A0 Caviar Blue). Tests were performed using BlackMagic Designs Disk Speed Test utility with a 600MB test file.

R: Read, W: Write. Values are MB/s. Average of 3 test runs reported.

Single disk - R: 89.3 - W: 60.9
RAID0 128k chunk, 2 disks - R: 105.0 - W: 79.0
RAID0 128k chunk, 4 disks - R: 106.9 - W: 82.5
RAID1 - R: 99.0 - W: 40.3
RAID5, 128k chunk, 3 disks - R: 59.6 - W: 16.8
RAID5, 128k chunk, 4 disks - R: 58.3 - W: 14.4
RAID10, 128k chunk, 4 disks - R: 97.6 - W: 41.7
RAID10, 128k chunk, 3 disks (degraded) - R: 100.7 - W: 54.8
RAID5 degraded - unable to test do to forced dismount once degraded.

A 4 disk RAID0 should be much faster than a 2 disk RAID0, so obviously 100MB/s is the max this card can do, even though SATA I should be able to do twice that.

RAID5 reads should the same as RAID0 reads, but not even close.

Hardware RAID5 writes should

Pros: Drivers install good in Windows 7 Pro 64bit.
No conflicts or BSOD.
Added 6 SATA ports to my second computer for $20.
My mobo only had 2 sata ports, so this card was a welcome surprise.

Cons: The jumper thing is a little weird

Other Thoughts: Don't expect high end performance on a $20 card. If you try and set up raid on this thing, expect to be mad. This thing is best used for CD Drives, hooking up front panel SATA and secondary hard drives. Dont put SSD on this thing and expect good performance either. If you want high end performance, start in the $100 range and work your way up. Newegg has some good options in this category.

amd athlon x2 5600 2.9ghz
nvidia 520 gt
msi mobo
4gb of ram
2 dvd burners
2 hard drives
This computer is used for audio production and video streaming and does the job well.