Question 1

Will this card boot from a DVD or Blue Ray drive?

Accepted Answer

I installed this card in order to use the new SATA 3 4 Terrabyte drives. when booting the bios checks the sata2 cd and dvd drives and then the 6 hdd drives then the esata2 drives and then the rosewill card. I say that if you set your bios to boot anything connected to this card that it would do the job just fine. most bios's allow you to select the order that  you want to boot the drives.  you should be able to select either dvd, blueray, or hard drive to boot first. With the asus motherboard that I use it will boot anything you want, but it will still check for the drives in the order that I mentioned above.

Question 2

I have an old LGA socket 775 board with PCI Express 1.0. Will this still give me sata 3 speeds (6gb) with this card? Limited funds preclude me from really upgrading.

Bruce

Accepted Answer

Sorry, I just don't know if it delivers speeds up to 6GB.  I use it to connect a secondary drive to the system for automated periodic backup only.  The only monitoring I do is to occasionally look to see that the backup happens as it should.

I can say it works reliably.

I run only office-type programs and speed beyond that kind of every-day computing aren't noticed.

Question 3

Will this support greater than 2.2G drives on XP32?

Accepted Answer

I have 3G drives but I'm running Linux. I'm not sure about the XP limitations.

Question 4

Has anyone tried to do hot swapping hard drives with this card?  I want to periodically read data off of hard drives without rebooting the computer all the time.

Accepted Answer

I have a bum sata port on my mobo, so i got this to link up my Vantech drive bay. 
I pull them out and replace them constantly for storage and vm purposes. 
I would not recommend hot swapping harddrives without first closing anything that is stored on them and safely removing them in the system tray option  (to prevent corruption) but as far as hardware is concerned, this is probably what you are looking for.

Question 5

can this be used for optical drives and internal card readers?

Accepted Answer

Yes it can, that's how I'm using mine.

Question 6

I have a mobo that is PCI 16X, has the longer slot that is  about 1/2 inch longer than the older PCI. Will this plug into the 16X pci express slot? Not sure how that works., I have seen other pci expr4ess slots that are shorter, PCI Express, PCI Ex 4X, PCI Ex 8X, PCI Ex 16X

Accepted Answer

Yes. I will work. If you have a short PCI. You can plug it in a longer PCI slot but you cannot put a long PCI into a shorter one. Example. PCI 4,8 can plug into a PCI 16 slot. Pci 16,8 cannot go into the 4 one.

Questions & Answers