Rosewill RC-211 Silicon Image 2 port SATA II PCI Express Host Controller Card RAID 0/1/0+1/5 JBOD

Pros: Everything worked perfectly, with no data lost as far as I can tell. I set up a RAID 1, and had one drive full of data and one new but formated. The Software is better than the manual that I downloaded but reading the manual ahead of time was a plus. The one that comes with the box is printed too small for me anyway.

Cons: I did have to buy two new SATA cables, because the one I had was too short and the new drive came without one.

Overall Review: I wish everytning was this easy.

Pros: This card is very inexpensive, the board is simple and has clean solder joints and quality connectors. It worked as a non-bootable hard drive controller card just fine. The manual has a lot of information and answers a number of common questions. Card supports more than 2 drives with a port multiplier.

Cons: No matter what way I tried, this card would not allow a drive to be bootable. I connected a bootable drive and tried several times to configure the arrays so that I could boot. I tried disabling the bios on the card but the controller was never bootable. Single lane PCI-e. Card was low profile and I had only one PCI-e port it would fit in because it couldn't clear the heatsinks etc directly behind my other PCI-e ports. The manual is written in poor English. Never found "pass-thru" mode, but if its in the manual I expect the firmware to already have support. The windows software for raid complains about UAC, I was never able to fix that even when I ran it as administrator.

Overall Review: I thought this card may be faster than my onboard controller, but I found out that wasn't the case in the end. Keep in mind this is a single lane PCI-e card, so even though this is 3.0Gbps SATA, PCI-e only supports 80% data due to encoding the clock, so the max 2.5Gbps PCI-e lane allows only 2.0Gbps of data each way. I originally was worried about replacing my onboard FakeRAID with this Silicon Image based FakeRAID. The manual confirmed to me that this shouldn't be used for an OS drive, only a data drive. Answer 21 in the manual says "we don't recommend to use RAID5, RAID0, RAID1, RAID10 as OS Disks. Please create the RAID setting and use the RAID features on Data Disks only."

Pros: Good Price. Supposedly works with most older server operating systems.

Cons: Doesn't work with Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit!

Overall Review: I *did* contact customer service and received the following response: >>>Hello MyName >>>Our Dear Valued Customer, >>>Thank you for your inquiry. >>>Unfortunately, the only drivers listed for server 2008 that Rosewill has is listed below. >>>Although you’re welcome to look on the chipset manufacture for any later drivers for your OS. There were links including one to the SiliconImage web site which didn't have the correct driver either. So -- to reiterate in an effort to inform potential customers who wish to run Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 -- this card is not compatible with that particular OS. | | | V

Pros: Has jumper to bypass onboard BIOS, very small size, seems sturdy, supports SATA II, supports LBA48, comes with latest firmware and drivers. Allows bootable install of RAIDed Windows XP once everything is figured out. It will get the job done, although I will use it for DVD and backup drive in IDE/SATA mode via jumper setting.

Cons: Confusing instructions, system will not boot if motherboard and card RAID are both turned on and drives are attached to card - at least one must be set to IDE/SATA mode (I was hoping to use both for RAIDing). Poor overall I/O performance compared to SB700. Somewhat of a CPU hog at times. GUI is OK, but need to read all instructions on SI website, 2 or 3 times. Took a lot of trail and error to figure everything out.

Overall Review: Stats from testing using PC Wizard on new Barracuda 250GB drives that were initialized, repartitioned and reformatted (Quick NTFS) before each test was run under Windows XP Pro: RAID0 Seq writes: SB700 55.85mb/s, RC-211 56.03mb/s Seq reads: SB700 227.07mb/s, RC-211 128.92mb/s Buff writes: SB700 249.82mb/s, RC-211 94.72mb/s Buff reads: SB700 341.64mb/s, RC-211 170.08mb/s Random reads: SB700 47mb/s, RC-211 40mb/s RAID1 Seq writes: SB700 47.37mb/s, RC-211 40.8mb/s Seq reads: SB700 139.92mb/s, RC-211 100.48mb/s Buff writes: SB700 169.47mb/s, RC-211 59.87mb/s Buff reads: SB700 228.49mb/s, RC-211 105.79mb/s Random reads: SB700 46mb/s, RC-211 38mb/s IDE/SATA Seq writes: SB700 54.9mb/s, RC-211 55.57mb/s Seq reads: SB700 140.82mb/s, RC-211 102.28mb/s Buff writes: SB700 183.42mb/s, RC-211 85.61mb/s Buff reads: SB700 212mb/s, RC-211 108.29mb/s Random reads: SB700 40mb/s, RC-211 43mb/s

Pros: - It's a Rosewill product - It's cheap

Cons: - It cannot be used as a simple SATA 2-port controller, which is unusual. They're defining "JBOD" to mean "spanned" here: concatenating 2 disks into a single logical volume.

Overall Review: I feel that Rosewill and Newegg let me down, since "JBOD" historically has not meant "span" and is not a type of RAID.

Pros: Piece of cake to install, didn't slow down my boot at all, works with a SATA Blu-ray drive without issue, red PCB, includes the SFF bracket if you need it, no drivers needed on Ubuntu 12.04+

Cons: No locking SATA connector

Overall Review: I needed an extra SATA port for my Blu-ray drive in a file server I built. To install this card all I did was set the jumper to disable the BIOS of this card and plugged it in to an empty PCI-E slot (I used a 16x slot but it only needs a 1x). My server already had Ubuntu Desktop 12.04 installed on it, boot time was normal and the Blu-ray drive was seen by Ubuntu without my needing to do anything. Other than setting the jumper it was entirely a "Plug&Play" experience.

Pros: PCI-E Interface 2x SATA

Cons: Drivers hard to find on the disk. They have drivers for about a dozen other controller cards and my Vista install disk could not find the correct driver on it's own. I had to go hunting for it for a while. For the record, it's under "(drive letter here):\SATA PCIe_Raid5_2Port\SiI3132\64bit_Win7" So far only seems to support one device at a time unless you have a RAID going. The SATA ports in this computer area dead and it has 2x SATA devices.

Overall Review: It's cheap and barely functional. Don't expect much out of it.

Pros: Works as advertised! RAIDs 0/1/JBOD easily. Comes with great software. Bootable EVEN WITH AN EXISTING OS if you know what you're doing (more on this below)

Cons: Unfortunately isn't hardware RAID. That's the only sad issue I have with this little card. Does its job perfectly otherwise.

Overall Review: Many of you may be imaging your drives then striping them onto the raid (perhaps through a bootdisk), only to find the BSOD. The issue is that you needed to have already installed the drivers for the RAID card. The way to manage this is to, BEFORE YOU IMAGE YOUR HDD, to insert the PCI-E x1 card WITHOUT THE BOOT HDD ATTACHED and start your computer regularly, then install the drivers for the new device, before imaging the HDD then striping it over.