I lot of jumpers on this thing, would be a safe bet to conclude this card has no bios setup screen? Can you use that little syba(marvell) raid GUI program. Support Nested raid?? How many ports will this thing support, if 8 is it dual channel and will it support those DUAL module(double sided 2x128) msata drives like "CMT 256L3M or SMSR150S3/256G" -- suppose you need a drive in your hands to test that feature. ??

Question

I lot of jumpers on this thing, would be a safe bet to conclude this card has no bios setup screen? Can you use that little syba(marvell) raid GUI program. Support Nested raid?? How many ports will this thing support, if 8 is it dual channel and will it support those DUAL module(double sided 2x128) msata drives like "CMT 256L3M or  SMSR150S3/256G" -- suppose you need a drive in your hands to test that feature. ??

Accepted Answer

Card only supports 4 SATA devices total (either 4 msata  connected in the msata slots or 4 SATA3 HD drives via the SATA port connections and you can mix for example 2 mSATA and 2 HD3 SATA connections, that is the reason that jumpers are on the board - to enable individual mSATA or SATA ports.  Regarding RAID setup, It only allows RAID 0, 1 or 10 which and as such is purely software RAID (implemented in hardware) as there is no processor on board, however, RAID setup is via  the Cntl-M key while booting up.  I have not tested whether the marvell RAID GUI app will work.  Personally, I did not use RAID but sort of tested it lightly.  I have it setup for ACHI with 4 mSATA as I have it in my Apple Mac Pro and have installed different versions of OSX in each mSATA and have no problem booting any of them.  If you plan on putting Windows, you have to be aware that Windows 7 has problems installing when non-windows partition are present.

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