Rosewill RC-215 VIA PCI SATA 1.5G x2 / ATA 133 (IDE) x1 Controller Card

Pros: Rosewill Brand <- Never let me down Sale Item Free Shipping Easy mechanical install

Cons: Sub Par Documentation and it matters. Unless I lived up to my somewhat high professed skill level I might have been screaming by now.

Overall Review: Unlike most guys I wanted this card for it's IDE slot. I have a couple IDE drives that are still good. I was trying to install XP on an IDE HD connected to the PCI card. My problem was getting the drivers for the card recognized during the install. The system does not have floppy so I needed to integrate the drivers to the install disc. I used nLite to do this. The controller card has a VIA chip on it made by Rosewill. The Rosewill drivers on the supplied disc and downloaded from their site are very difficult to understand regarding just what the HECK driver do I want....too many options and the supplied directions did not do the task. All attempts failed with the Rosewill drivers. I went to VIA, downloaded their drivers did the integration and all was good. Too bad this item looks to be discontinued because I recommend it if you have a somewhat high sill level and patience

Pros: Added 2 SATA ports to my old computer, giving me 2 SATA drives for my windows home server storage. Reasonably fast, and no compatibility problems. Included software to help manage RAID configuration and monitor health of the drives and RAID Array.

Cons: Can't seem to use normal SMART monitoring software so windows home server can't monitor the health of the attached drives. Couldn't get the card to boot from the SATA drives due to a limitation of the old motherboard it is plugged into.

Overall Review: Nice inexpensive way to add SATA ports to older computers so you can use newer, faster, larger capacity drives.

Pros: - cheap - PATA connector - comes with a low-profile bracket - OS can be booted from it - can clone to drives attached to it using older tools such as Ghost 2002

Cons: - no leads to connect case HDD activity light to it - cannot get S.M.A.R.T. data display in HDTune

Overall Review: Those who complain about this card being SATA 1.5G only please remember that PCI 2.2 provides only ~133Mbyte/s of bandwidth that is also shared across all devices attached to the bus, so your bottleneck is the PCI bus itself and not the SATA link as even at 1.5Gbit/s it can easily saturate the bus. For this same reason it makes little sense to use SSDs with this adapter if speed is the main goal. If you're thinking to speed up your old SATA-less system by getting this card and a SATA drive it only makes sense if you have an older slow (5400rpm) HDD. Even then you shouldn't expect to be blown away because of the PCI bottleneck, but you'll likely observe a noticeable improvement in OS boot and app launch times (I did). Also you can probably get a comparable improvement from just using a 7200rpm PATA drive. Perhaps the only scenario where you'd really want this card is for large drives as they now don't come in the PATA flavor.

Pros: Worked out of the box

Cons: Really bad instructions, no help online

Overall Review: This card has the Via VT6421 chipset. Methinks Via sells this as a reference design; Rosewill and others just produce the design and put out the card. The instructions are pitiful and riddled with typos. After regular POST, the card does its own POST but ONLY if there is a drive attached to it. No drive, no POST. This is confusing to the average user because the first time you boot up after installing, you don't attached a hard drive, you just want to see it work. Win 7 recognized the card and installed the drivers right away. It shows up under RAID controllers. I then moved one of my SATA drives from the mobo connector to the SATA connector on this card, and when I rebooted, the card had its own POST after the system's POST. Note that to enter the card's POST you have to hit CTRL+Z, not what the instructions say. The card read the drive fine. When connected to my mobo drive gave 60Mb/sec and when connected to card I got 35Mb/sec I only use card for extra SATA ports

Pros: at first i thought that the dvd burner that i bought won't work on it and it just will work in hard drives but not.... it is totally compatible with dvd driver or burners

Cons: as far i know nothing bad YET.....(rosewill is a good company tho) :D

Pros: Good overall controller card 3 drive slots (2 SATA, 1 ATA) Supports multiple OS User friendly instruction manual Driver installation CD

Cons: SATA 1.5 (not 3.0)

Overall Review: I have been using this card for nearly a year without any issues at all. Used this card to connect a 250GB SATA (3.0) HDD to my old motherboard which only has ATA. Simply popped a jumper into the HDD to force it into SATA 1.5 transfer mode before installing. Had to copy the driver from the CD onto a floppy for a fresh install of Windows XP on the unformatted HDD. The manual explains this procedure well.

Pros: I plugged it in and the BIOS and Win7 x64 recognized it immediately. No Driver or other issues at all. I installed Win7 x64 on a newly formatted PATA drive through this card with no issues

Cons: None

Overall Review: I haven't built a system in 7 years and my old single core P4 and AGP card were just running hot, so I decided to upgrade on the cheap. However all my drives are PATA and needed a card to use them on my new mobo. After I installed all my new hardware I attached a newly formatted PATA drive to this card, started up the system, the UEFI BOIS recognized it, and I installed Win7 x64 with no issues. After that I attached my other HDD and all's well. I'm booting my system from the drive attached to this card so no complaints at all. Now I just need to save up to replace these old drives. Current System: Pentium G620 ASRock H61iCafe Mobo G.Skill DDR3 1600 Memory

Pros: Works in Windows 7 Ultimate x64 without installing any additional drivers. Provides an IDE port as well as 2X SATA 1.5 ports. Works with my Samsung IDE DVD burner.

Cons: Takes up a PCI slot. Slows boot times by a few seconds, but since I'm using a Crucial M4 SSD it's hardly noticeable.

Overall Review: My motherboard (ASRock 890GX Pro3) doesn't have an IDE port so I got this to hook up a Samsung DVD burner (cheaper than buying a SATA DVD burner). I plugged this card into a PCI slot and booted my computer. This card and the attached drive were recognized without having to make any adjustments in BIOS. The DVD burner has worked ever since. Nuff said.