Rosewill RC-221 PCI Low Profile Ready SATA Controller Card

Pros: Installed on Win7 and seems to work great
- Box says compatible with Win7
- Contacted Rosewill and they said Win7 drivers not available
- Rosewill website only has Vista and older drivers dated 2007
-- Installed Vista drivers from website and it seems to work (Win7 could not find any drivers)
-- Setup 2 drives in Mirror configuration - can unplug either drive and data is still available. Mirror Raid 1 drives are also readable with other nonRaid interfaces as a regular standalone drive.
-- fast writes, and still works after about a week of use, --and can still recover data

Cons: Confusing installation and operation instructions
-- jumper on board - for boot (activate drives) or non boot (don't activate drives)
-- must boot and bios-configure RAID setup before installing drivers.
-- installed vista drivers with Win7 Device Manager (update driver)
-- Still unsure how reliable drivers are or if I will have future problems, since Rosewill is so vague about actual support.

Other Thoughts: -- Didn't notice a JBOD configuration in the initial setup menu, (not interested) but maybe some combination of Turn RAID off configuration might pop up a JBOD status.

Pros: Card seems to work -- note that the RAID functionality is a future item for me and I haven't tried it yet.

The card comes with two brackets (half-height and full-height). That feature was a lifesaver.

Cons: The jumper did indeed fall off on me. I didn't notice it at the time. Pressing the F4 (Configure) key during BIOS load resulted in "Device not attached" or similar error.
The GUI SATARaid.exe (you have to look for it) command just errored out without a meaningful message.

Rosewill techsupport has yet to respond to my original request for help.

Attaching another jumper resolved the load and attachment problems.

This is not spec'd (so I don't count it as a bad thing) but don't expect to get full BacX Duet functionality with this card -- I only see one of the two SATA drives.

Other Thoughts: Never received a reply from Rosewill tech support. The price is good but if I ever get a "real" problem, I wonder if I'll be able to get knowledgeable (or any) assistance.

Pros: *Two eSATA ports
*Supports RAID 0 (Striping) and RAID 1 (Mirroring)
*Jumper enable / disable onboard SATA BIOS
*NewEgg Customer Care - fast shipping. Thanks!

Cons: *No eSATA cable included
*No mention of the Jumper settings in the manual
*Jumper itself has a little finger grip on it that while useful for easier jumper placement, it is SO long that it interfered with the adapter in the adjoining PCI slot. It also hangs DOWN and was somewhat loose (worried about falling off). I just replaced it with an extra normal jumper I had.

Other Thoughts: Essentially the same card as the Rosewill RC-220, except this one supports RAID. On special when I got it - was actually less than RC-220 with more features. Jumper feature is awesome. It has an onboard BIOS - lets you include attached hard drives in the boot sequence. This is the DEFAULT jumper position, so if this is what you want, leave the jumper alone. If you don't want this, move the jumper to the upper position (pins 2-3) and this card's BIOS is bypassed. Very slick. I installed it in a dual boot WinXP/Win7 machine, and had no problems with it being identified and drivers being loaded on either OS. WinXP loaded drivers from the CD and Win7 loaded them from Windows Update. Performance increase over USB 2.0 was impressive - exactly what I bought this card for
WinXP 5GB file Read/Write (USB) 14.5 MB/s - 14.9 MB/s
WinXP 5GB file Read/Write (eSATa) 83.8 MB/s - 55.0 MB/s
Win7 5GB file Read/Write (USB) 13.2 MB/s - 12.6 MB/s
Win7 5GB file Read/Write (eSATA) 107.3 MB/s - 93.2 MB/s
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