Question 1

Can I use this card to just add more non-RAID internal drives to my computer if I'm not interested in RAID at the moment?

Accepted Answer

Yes, just plugged it in, installed latest drivers and it worked. Didn't bother with raid. This was with windows 8.1

Question 2

Will this controller support 3TB drives?

Accepted Answer

Yes it does.

In my case I connected 4 x2TB drives to it and created a 4TB RAID 10 single disk. works just fine.

Question 3

will this take over and run the sata 3 slots on the motherboard? Will this manage a combination of hard drives that run at different speeds along with DVD CD and blue-ray burners at the same time?

Accepted Answer

It runs independently of the other SATA slots. It just adds to what you have. (I had 6, now I have 10) it will RAID on its own or along with what you have. I have it set for JBOD and I have II and III plugged into it and its been working fine. Just one extra screen during boot and thats it

Question 4

Is there software that accompanies this raid card? Intel raids have their matrix/rapid storage software and AMD has their AMD raid software. DOes The syba card have any software?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The SATA RAID controller the Syba card uses is a Marvell chip. When you download and install the driver, it'll also install the Marvell storage utility, which is a web browser-based GUI. It's not quite as slick as Intel's RST, but it gets the job done as a reasonably easy-to-understand interface.

Question 5

I am looking to get a decent, inexpensive, RAID controller and have a few questions about this one.

This is how I plan to use the card:

2x WD 4TB HDD in RAID 1

2x Corsair 120GB SSD in RAID 0

My questions:

Will this card support 2 sets of drives in different RAID arrays?

Will this card allow the RAID 0 SSD's to perform as intended, or will it bottleneck them?

Accepted Answer

I bought this to try an icydock turbo swap, hot swap sata bay on a super micro server mother board with an older pcie slot.  the card is recognized under the windows sbs 2003 now running, but no hot-swapping is possible yet.  It shows up in the bios as capable of 6.0GB/s on the board and I can run the intel raid utility to configure multiple raid types; i seem to be able to build as many arrays and types as the number of drives allow.

That's all I can say, it looks good and seems flexible; I haven't tried raid on this card and sbs 2003 won't do what I want it to with this card (but that's a software limitation)

Question 6

Hello & thanks in advance.  Is this device supported by Server 2012r2?

Accepted Answer

The latest driver is 2008 service pack 2.

I have several of these controllers.  They are not expensive. I use them for standalone systems.  RAID 1.  They work great.  The only problem I have had is with the Marvel desktop interface which will not let me login to check the status.  This is not a big problem, you can still maintain the system during startup.

Question 7

Will this card work in a PCIe x1 slot, and if so how would the resulting speed compare to the "SYBA SI-PEX40064 PCI-Express 2.0 SATA III (6.0Gb/s) Controller Card" also in a PCIe X1 slot? Im trying to decide between the two cards.

Accepted Answer

This card will not work, nor will it fit, in a PCIe x1 it a PCIe x1 slot. It will fit in a x4 and above. As far as the comparison between the two cards, This card appears to have a hardware RAID controller where as the SI-PEX40064 does not, however, if you are using the port multiplier you won't be able to use the hardware RAID Controller on this card. Also from the SYBA website: This card "Does not support more than 4 Drives for Linux and Mac OS. Even if used with a port multiplier, max drives accepted is 4 drives."

If you are just trying to add drives without hardware RAID, either one of these is a decent choice if:
a. you have an open x4, x8 or x16 slot available this is a good pick. 
b. you only have an x1 slot open then you should get the other card.

Question 8

If I RAID 0 two 512GB Samsung 840 Pro SSDs on this, how close to the advertised 6Gbps ( 768MB ) performance should I expect? It's a Dell T110 II tower w/ an Intel® Xeon® Processor E3-1240 v2 
(8M Cache, 3.40 GHz), 32GB 1600 Non-ECC. Have one PCIe 2 x8 slot and one PCIe 2 x8 slot w/ x4 routing available. Thanks.

Accepted Answer

First, remember that 6 Gbps is a theoretical maximum. No drive, controller, or system will be able to maintain - nor indeed reach - that speed. There is always overhead.

Also, this controller has two PCI Express 2.0 lanes - so its theoretical maximum throughput (for the entire controller, not per port) is 5 Gbps, or 640 MB/s. Again, no drive - or set of drives in RAID 0 - will be able to reach this theoretical maximum, but they can come close.

I am running 4x 60 GB OCZ Solid III drives in RAID 0 on this controller. These are older drives, and while they are SATA III drives, the flash memory on them is nowhere near as fast as that on the Samsung 840 Pros you're asking about, but the maximum throughput I am able to achieve from this array on this controller is around 540 MB/s sequential read (measured with CrystalDiskMark). Writes are slower (though that's a limitation of the drives, not the controller or PCI Express interface).

That's around 85% of the theoretical maximum, and probably pretty close to the fastest you'll get (it's roughly the equivalent of one bit per byte of overhead). So, I feel comfortable saying that with your more modern drives, you'll have no problem reaching those read numbers (and perhaps maybe even beating them, though probably not by much), and hopefully your sequential write speeds will be fairly close to them.

Keep in mind, though, that maximum throughput is rarely the main reason to go with SSDs. The true performance gains are found in the random reads and writes, which are ~100 times faster than traditional hard drives - however, they're in the low-double digits of MB/s, so even a SATA I controller on an old PCI bus is more than sufficient bandwidth for these speeds.

Suffice it to say, if you know what you're doing and understand the application to which you're applying this solution, I think you'll be quite satisfied - as I have been - with the results.

Question 9

Will this card work with Windows 10 64 bit, and how would I set up Raid 0 (2 x 1TB Western Digital Blue HDD's for stuff like games and unimportant/ re-downloadable data) and a RAID 1 (2 x 250GB Samsung 850 EVO  for stuff I can't recover such as Photoshop works and things I don't want to risk loosing in the unlikely event of SSD failure) on this one card? NOTE: I am not booting off any of these drives. My OS and drivers are on a separate 120GB M.2 SSD.

Accepted Answer

This card should work with windows 10, though it might be tricky; it seems that the driver is not signed; Windows 10 may instead use a generic driver allowing you to set up a software raid. Looking through the driver files (manufacturer's website) there is a 64 bit driver (Windows 7 x64 compatible, which should work with windows 10).
You would configure the raid options via the Marvell RAID utility from the manufacturer if windows 10 accepts the driver.
Most decent motherboards will have RAID capabilities, the reason I purchased this card was ESXi compatibility, which is a far cry from Windows.

Question 10

I have been using this card for a little over a year,  suddenly it started giving me disk errors,  however I discovered that the errors were from the controller not the hard drive.  (connected directly to onboard sata port no errors)  So contacted SYBA they replaced the card.   However,  with the new card,  works fine after installation but after using a few minutes, the computer no longer shows the  hard drive.   Comes back on reboot,  or after I put the computer to sleep and wake it back up.   SYBA Tech Support just shrugged this off as they replaced my card nothing they can do about the IO drop outs.  I am sure the problem is in their card not my motherboard,  but will check it out further.   Does anyone have any ideas for a solution?

Accepted Answer

Jim,

I bought another model of this card that supported raid 0 and it lasted 6 months before having the drop out issue.  I replaced it with this card that you have (without RAID) and its lasted over a year.  I think its hit or miss on these cards.  When they are working, its a great way to get SATA 3 on an older motherboard ( like mine) and bypass the south bridge.  But, I think the quality control is something they need to improve.

Questions & Answers