Question 1

How loud is this? Has anyone tried running it without the fan?

Accepted Answer

I've had two running in my PC for months and they are practically silent.  That said, there's little reason to remove the fan even in a "silent" PC build.

Question 2

Would this add 5 drives? or could it be configured to act as a single drive?

Accepted Answer

The drive itself is not a hardware RAID and only presents as 5 separate drives (think JBOD).  Nothing prevents you from doing something software level, in my case it works fine for constructing a ZFS pool.

Question 3

Hello, would this work on an Apple Mac Pro?

Accepted Answer

Yes, the SYBA SI-PEX40142 Controller Card supports all Windows and macOS operating systems.

Question 4

Why is this product bottlenecked to only 2x lanes when it takes up a x16 slot?

Accepted Answer

Probably backwards compatible with older PCIe generations, is usually what that means.
Trust me, they don't want to spend more on gold than they need to.

Question 5

Should I worry about PCIe Bifurcation?

Accepted Answer

No, you do not need to worry about PCIe bifurcation for this product. The SYBA SI-PEX40142 controller card uses the JMB585 chipset to provide PCIe Gen3 x2 bandwidth to 5 M.2 SATA Base B-key SSDs without requiring any additional hardware configuration such as bifurcation.

Question 6

does this accept 5 NVME drives and give them each two lanes? or is it two lanes bandwidth shared among all of the drives?

In short, can i read at PCI-E gen3 X2 speeds from all the drives at the same time, or are they all sharing that data bandwidth

Accepted Answer

This card is for SATA drives only. All the drives share the pcie 2x bandwidth  of the card, about 1gigabyte per sec

Questions & Answers