Rosewill RC-208 PCI IDE (ATA) Silicon Image Host Controller un-RAID Card - Also Supports Window Vista Ready

Pros: Works flawlessly with FreeNAS, Ubuntu and Clarkconnect flavors of Linux. You !!!CAN!!! boot from this card. Adds large disk support to older motherboards.

Cons: Only boots from the primary port and ports are not labeled. I'll save you the guesswork, the red port is primary.

Overall Review: I haven't tried this card with Windows, only Linux but a boot partition is a boot partition as far as the MB is concerned. In my case, I had to select "SCSI boot device" as my primary boot device in the BIOS and it booted right up. This was on an old Athlon 800mhz system. In my even older 500mhz IBM Aptiva, I didn't have to make any BIOS changes for it to boot. I was able to boot from a CDROM also using this card.

Pros: This controller does what I bought it to do. I have a 750 GB and 500 GB connected and the installation went well. I had emailed Rosewill Tech support a couple of times before buying it and the responses were prompt, informative and even friendly.

Cons: none

Overall Review: Works for me in a Windows Home Server.

Pros: The card came with the latest bios (3.2.24) and it DOES boot from a CD. I loaded a working instance of Win2K with CMOS settings: Hard Disk Boot Priority set to "Bootable Add-in Cards" as first choice, First Boot Device set to "CDROM" and Boot Other Device set to "Enabled". When finished, reverse the above changes so the hard drive will boot.

Cons: None - what it says is what I got.

Overall Review: Get the latest BIOS and drivers from Silicon Image who make the chipset. Here's the path on their home page: Products by Product Number -> SiL0680A -> Support tools -> BIOS or Drivers. BIOS flashers for both DOS and Windows are available. The drivers on the floppy which came with the card are quite old so the latest can be downloaded and installed as covered in the instructions in the .zip files.

Pros: I reviewed this product a while back after i got my frist one. i just ordered another today.

Cons: none

Overall Review: with everyone giving me there old 250GB ide drives i have ran out of ide in my file server, so now i will have 2 of these cards in there running 8 WD ide 250GB drives! .... UNF!

Pros: Price is right, recognized 2-320GB Seagates.

Cons: No big deal, but had to download newer drivers for it to work.

Overall Review: Cheap alternative to buying a new MB if you need larger HDDs.

Pros: Inexpensive, especially when on sale. Great addition to modern motherboards which only have one ATA socket. Works well with Win XP, Windows 7, Windows 2008.

Cons: Can appear to be DOA, when it is not. Will not boot from harddrive, boot drive cannot use this controller. See notes below.

Overall Review: Works fine with cable select, even when instructions talk about master/slave installation. Cannot mix WD drives with CD/DVD drives on the same cable. This is also true for other ATA controllers. CD/DVD works, WD drive appears dead. Two WD drives on same cable work fine. This board is PCI slot sensitive. Some older network, SCSI, or video boards installed between this adapter and the CPU will block signals, allowing recognition of adapter by OS but blocking data transfer. Solution: rearrange PCI boards on motherboard, place this adapter in slot electrically (usually physically) nearest CPU. I could not get this adapter to boot from hard drive on two different motherboards. This may be due to back revision BIOS on adapter. The Silicon Image website has newer rev BIOS but I could not get the BIOS installer to work for this board. The Rosewill site does not provide a way to update the BIOS on this adapter. Solution: place boot drive on the ATA adapter built into motherboard.

Pros: It works on Win7 (64 bit)

Cons: Need to download the latest firmware from the Rosewill website for it to work properly with Win7. The discs that come with the product are antiquated and useless.

Overall Review: If you're installing this with Win7 (64 bit), go to the Rosewill website. Do a search for "RC-208" in the Support area. Download the firmware. To avoid complications, don't connect the cable to anything with the card. Get the firmware to recognize under "update firmware" in System Settings. Once recognized, install the cable to the device. It should boot up fine. After all is said and done, the product works with my hard drives and is well priced to work with my legacy devices.

Pros: My older motherboard supported only Ultra ATA/100. I bought the RC-208 controller to use with a Western Digital Ultra ATA/133 drive and a DVD burner. I've had no problems with it running under Windows XP Home w/SP2 using the latest BIOS and drivers from Silicon Image. The performance increase over the on-board controller was much more than I had expected. I'm very satisfied.

Cons: Transfers are a bit slow when running Norton/Symantec Ghost in DOS but that's no surprise. The performance with Windows XP more than makes up for it.