I needed more sata ports, and my motherboard only had 3. This allowed me to add 4 more ports, and thus 4 more hard drives. The card was recognized by windows 10, so I had no driver issues. The card worked so great that I ended up buying another card.
- Ease of setup - Speed / functionality
-- Connect up-to 16 drives -- Detected without issue in FreeNAS 9.10
Very fast. Did I mention it is fast. My CPU is fast, but this allows my CPU to not do any RAID parity calculations. Also, this has 1 GB onboard cache which does help with some file transfers. I mainly need fast sequential reads/writes with large files. Supports PCIe 3.0 and backwards compatible, which is good because Sandy Bridge CPUs do not support PCIe 3.0 :-( Future proof as these support 12 Gb/sec or excess of 1.2 GB/s if you have PCIe 3.0. My HDDs are too slow to take advantage of the speed, but it has helped in the RAID 5 though. The SSDs on it are insane.
I added this interface to a Proxmox VM system to add SSD drives to a virtual NAS machine. Proxmox easily identified the controller and I was able to pass thru the SSD's to the NAS.
low cost. amazing for non raid proformance increase.
Both ESATA port works as port multiplier. I tested on two AD5SARM6G and working well under Windows 7 Ult so I got another just incase.
Great Raid card that's extremely Quick (would be perfect for lots of SSD's) Easy to Setup
- Works out of the box on FreeBSD 11 - No issues with 4Kn drives