Question 1

Can 2 of these be used together?

Accepted Answer

If the question is"can two of these be installed and function independently?" The answer is yes.
If the intention is to build a RAID across the two cards, the answer is Yes so long as the two slots have the same specs. 
JBOD & RAID 0 & 1 were no problem, but RAID 5 did not work for me. ASUS Z77WS.
ALSO had issues when adding Rocketdrive port multiplier when using both e SATA for ext servers.
Hope this helps

Question 2

Will this card work in a PCI-E 2.0x16 slot?

Accepted Answer

Taken right from the requirements section of the specs:

" Requirements

Desktop PC with an available x2, x4, x8 or x16 PCIe slot"

So yes, it will.

Question 3

Is it compatable with Server 2012 standard?

Accepted Answer

I assume you mean Windows Server 2012, I had installed Server 2012 on it before as an experiment and it seemed to work OK which is more than I can say for vSphere. It did seem to choke on making a virtual drive for a VM but I that could have been due to the drive being a large fixed-size drive. I ended up replacing my OS shortly after that so I didn't put Server 2012 through its paces.

Question 4

One reviewer said this does support Windows 10 another said it doesn't. Does this support Windows 10?

Accepted Answer

Yes, I have it running on Windows 10 with no issues.

Question 5

Can this card be used simply as an additional 4 stand alone sata ports without configuring for any RAID set up?

Accepted Answer

Yes.  The instructions are in the user manual to do exactly what you are asking.

Question 6

I need to mirror 2x Toshiba SATAIII 5TB 7200rpm drives under Windows 7 Home 64bit. Will this card support 5TB drives? Does it have the throughput to support 7200rpm drives? And will it work under Windows 7 64bit?

Accepted Answer

From the manufacturer site, it only supports up to 4TB Drives. It does work with Win 7 64bit, and works fine with 7200 rpm drives.

siig . com / dp-sata-6gb-s-4-port-hybrid-pcie.html
(remove spaces for link above to work)

[quote]
Supports 6Gb/s data transfer rate
Supports 48-bit LBA and verified to work with up to 4TB drives
Supports hardware RAID (RAID 0, 1, 10)
[/quote]

Question 7

will this work with a pci-e 2.0 x 16 slot?

Accepted Answer

I suppose it depends on your motherboard.  Mine is connected to a x16 slot.

Question 8

Does this device support Hot swapping?

Accepted Answer

Joe,
 I have this card set up with two raids and YES it does support hot swaps.
Had good luck overall with the cards in terms of speed and compatibility--bought three (2 raids and one not).

Just FYI the external eSATAs require that you sacrifice one of the internals if you want to use them.

Question 9

Does anyone know if this will work with VMWare ESXi 5.5 or 6.0 ?

Accepted Answer

You may have to make call to both Co's; SIIG & the VM people on this.

Question 10

I have an Asrock Extreme board that has native Marvell controller. I've tried several cards with Marvell chipsets and they do not work with this board, there are conflicts between the drivers. Usually, nothing plugged in is even recognized. I have a card now with Asmedia chipset which works fine but only has 2 internal ports. Is there a way around this so I can use cards such as this? I see all sorts of issues with various 990FX boards with Marvell chipsets online but few and confusing solutions. I basically just want to add drives, but may want to experiments with RAID at some point.

Accepted Answer

AFAIK you are not able to run any other type of drivers with this card, and the drivers that comes with it are Marvell. This is one of the faults with Asrock motherboards, as compared to ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, is the driver compatibility issues.

If you are looking for just a SATA Controller, they are often cheaper and have higher compatibility due to less features required to support and i would recommend going that route.

I've used this card for 4x1TB drives in a RAID10 array for 2 years and it works great without issues on an Asus Crosshair Formula IV motherboard.

I'd recommend picking another card, as the only solution to fixing your incompatibility issue with Marvell controllers would be ether A) BIOS Firmware patch, or B) change of motherboard.

Questions & Answers