Mediasonic ProBox HP1-SS3 PCI-Express 2.0 x1 SATA III (6.0Gb/s) Controller Card

Pros: Cheap

Cons: Drivers did not work with my AMD-based system and Sans Digital eSATA box. System would hang up when booted and eSATA box was on or if system was booted with eSATA box off and then turned on after boot was complete. Tried both available driver versions.

Other Thoughts: Can figure out why this company makes it so difficult to get the drivers. Never heard of having to go to a web forum to get drivers for an add-on card.

Pros: I bought this to work with a generally good mediasonic esata enclosure. Getting the right driver wasn't trivial, but is possible if you google for other folks who have found the right French site that serves up what appears to be the right drivers.

Cons: However, the drivers are unreliable, or maybe it is the card. Sometimes upon booting the system (Windows 7, i7, 16GB RAM), the drivers will work, other times, they will work for a while, and then drop the drives and show Controller and other ATAPI errors in the Windows Event Log. Still other times, they won't load at all, and I find that the controller has been seeking all the disks endlessly until I turn off the mediasonic enclosure in disgust. Oh, and I'm sure there's nothing better than having your hard drives seek endlessly after controller errors occur. FWIW, all the drives can work fine with another controller and are less than 3 months old.

Other Thoughts: Mediasonic makes great enclosures. They should be embarrassed to offer these cards. I won't trust my data to them.

Pros: installed ok in Win 7/64 with downloaded port multiplier driver.

Cons: Speed is terrible. Transferring USB 3.0 to ESATA getting under 15 mbs. Before installing the card using USB 3.0 to USB 3.0 I was near 100 mbs. Support from mfg of CineRaid external sata box said I should be over 100mbs with the esata. I'll be returning this terrible performing card and trying Startech. If Startech is just as bad, knock goes to CineRaid box, and I'll update this review if that is the case.

Pros: Working fine. Can recognize all 4 drives in San Digital enclosure.
Speed is fast.

Cons: Need to load driver from manufacture web site for MP function.

Pros: works stabily if you disable ncq

Cons: lacking linux support... it's found and there's a module but be prepared for some surprises if you use it's multiport functionality. Specifically you'll need to disable NCQ to not only keep your drives performance up, but prevent corruption from happening. Things even broke in multi-drive simultaneous read tests which I was just dd'ing the drives directly to get performance numbers and stability tests. Avoid this card (limited to about 120MiB/s) and the sil3125 (silent corruption issues) and get yourself a sy-pex40033 card... don't expect performance over 220MiB/s though.

Pros: all drives detected working in attached SansLogic eSATA PM Storage enclosure, iff the special driver is loaded (check Mediasonic website)

Cons: would be nice to have a note, stating the need for a driver under Windows7...

Other Thoughts: excellent price/performance ratio

Pros: Great Card. Running the 8-Bay Mediasonic ProBox with 8 drives. Before I was using the Silicon Image 3132 Chipset card. When transferring data, it was slow and system would hand for several seconds at a time because that chipset couldn't handle the load. This card as the AS chipset which is far superior. No lag, hang-ups, PLUS fast transfer speeds.

**** BE SURE TO VISIT MEDIASONIC FORUMS/SITE FOR AS DRIVER. WINDOWS DRIVER WILL NOT LET PORT MULTIPLIER WORK*****

Cons: None, except within 3 days of buying this went to no shipping :(

Pros: As far as I can tell, this is the only properly working ESATA listed at a reasonable price. I've had two controllers before this one, one using a RocketRaid chipset and the other using a Silicon Image chipset, neither of them worked properly. However, this board with the Asmedia chip works perfectly with my Sans Digital enclosures. Disk read and write speeds have also been great.

Cons: None I have encountered so far.

Other Thoughts: If you're looking for a controller to drive your port-multiplied Sans Digital or Rosewill enclosures, look no further.