Question 1

can each hard drive work by them self or do I need to use Raid?

Accepted Answer

This will allow drives to work individually - also referred to as JBOD or Just a Bunch Of Disks. I believe you could also run Raid 1 with 2 disks and have 2 individual disks as well.

Question 2

All I need is a couple more SATA ports I am not looking to use RAID. I can't use my one PCIe x 1 because it has my WiFi card in it. Will this do what I need?

Accepted Answer

This should be what you need as long as you are OK with slower speeds. The max total transfer speed will be 266 MB/s.  Hard disk drives and optical drives should be fine but solid state drives will be bottlenecked. This will also add a few more seconds to your boot time since this card must be initialized.

Question 3

Is this card able t

Is this card Bootable from the bios or does it require pretty loaded drivers?

Accepted Answer

This card is quickly becoming outdated as it is only sata II and not the faster sata III of today as such when I researched this card for my use which is to use it specifically to run 2 of my dvd drives on in order to free up 2 of my onboard sata III ports on my motherboard for additional hard drive use I read a lot of reviews from purchasers complaining of having problems with having issues with trying to set this card up to run in raid or to use it to boot from hard drives attached to it, for my use to run a couple of dvd drives from it functions ok but of course it is not the fastest and for the price range it is at right now it will suffice for me but I myself would not use it to run my boot drives from as the chipset itself is a little on the buggy side and is rapidly becoming outdated.

Question 4

Would this card support 4tb drives?

Accepted Answer

Yes, I have a couple 4tb drives plugged in to one of these to supplement the sata ports on my mobo. They populate and function as you'd expect.

Question 5

Is this compatible with an hp pavillion p6318f desktop pc?. And if not what card with 4 ports like this is compatible?

Accepted Answer

As far as I know, if you have an empty PCI slot this card will work.  I use it entirely now as my motherboard's online SATA failed so this card supports all my drives and dvd burner.  You might ask someone who has an hp computer if it's difficult to open the case and add an online card.

Question 6

Can this car run a raid 10 smoothly?

Accepted Answer

No. This is a RAID 0 or RAID 1 card. It does not support RAID 5 or RAID 10. Those are completely different RAID setups.

Question 7

Can I run dvd drives from this card or is this just for hard drives?

Accepted Answer

Works with DVD drives that are sata

Question 8

What's the maximum hard drive size I can use with this controller?

Accepted Answer

My SYBA sd-sata-4p box says "Support 48-bit sector addressing for HDD capacity of 137GB or higher"

Question 9

Can I use software raid with this like FreeNas in RAID 5. The card itself only supports Raid 1, 0, 1+0 but I assume that the hardware raid. So would it be possible to disable the raid on the card and just leave it up to FreeNAs with this card?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Using software RAID (ZFS2) with FreeNAS has been my application for this card. No hardware RAID configuration required.

Question 10

What is the speed difference between this card (PCI) and one that
used PCIe x1?

Accepted Answer

I think it has exactly 2 times the speed of PCIe x1.

Questions & Answers