Question 1

How hard was it to configure your hard drive to boot off this expansion card? For reference I have an x58 EVGA that I would plan on buying this go get SATA 3 performance on a SATA 2 board. Thanks!

Accepted Answer

Hi Tim,

First off the manual that comes with this board is worthless. I have an old Intel DX58SO MB that is still a good board with a decent cpu and I wanted to boot and Intel 520 series 120GB SSD off this card. No raid just plain boot into Win 7 64-bit. I wrote the folks at syba and told them what I wanted to do and they send me a link to the new software and told me the exact name of the file I would need. You have to reinstall your OS and do a custom install and tell it you need to load a driver. I have the files on a USB thumb drive and pointed it to that proper folders and everything went off without a hitch. Win 7 finds the correct file without any help. Just write them and they will answer real quick, same day. Hope this helps.

Question 2

I don't see any pins for HDD activity LED indicator and nothing in print about it.  Do drives connected to this card show activity on your HDD LED?

Accepted Answer

Thanks Calvin.  Some years ago and on another machine, I purchased and used a similar card (outdated now days).  It didn't have disk activity indicator function.  Once in a while, it was irritating not to be able to check if the disk was spinning or not.
Have a Happy Thanksgiving and take care.
C.

Question 3

Does this fit in a PCI Express x1 slot?

Accepted Answer

It's been a while since I bought this, but it certainly does look like it's pcie 1x

Question 4

My motherboard has the following slots:
1 * PCI Express x16 (2.0)
3 * PCI Express x1

The x16 slot is utilized by the video card leaving just the x1 slots vacant.

The Dell Vostro 260 manual just states:

Bus Speed:  PCI Express 2.0

Bus Type:  PCI Express x1-slot (includes mini PCI-Express) support speed – 500 Mbps (Gen 2)

PCI Express x16-slot-support speed – 8 Gbps (Gen 2)

My motherboard has an Intel h61 chipset that only supports SATA II. Will this controller card over-ride the chipset restriction/limitation so it supports SATA III speeds of a solid state drive (SSD)? Also does this card connect to the motherboard via a PCI Express x1 socket?

Accepted Answer

This board will work within the boundaries of itself (SataIII) and the bus speed, which you state is 500 Mbps.  The existing Sata controller is not part of the equation.  I bought this board a few months ago to put into Windows Home Server 1 and add more 2T drives, and it's worked perfectly.  I have not tried it with a SSD, nor (horrors!) have I done benchmarks.  
I would expect the board to work satisfactorily in your Dell machine.  If ultimate speed is a priority, be prepared to open your wallet...  If you do get the card and run some benchmarks, please post the results.

Question 5

with this work with GA-X58A-UD9 without any issues?  Will I have to turn off built in controllers?

Accepted Answer

I can confirm that multiple cards will work together.  At least they will with a GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD3.  I've got three servicing 12 HDDs and another on the way from Newegg.  All connect to iStarUSA BPN-DE340SS-BLACK 4 in 3 cages for a total of 16 HDDs in an Antec 1200 full tower case.  I've decided to not run any drives from the MB.  The configuration runs UnRAID from a thumbdrive connected to one of the internal headers.  Great use of an old board/CPU/Chassis.  36 TB for Storage, Dual Parity and two drives for the write cache.

Question 6

will this work with a 1gb or 2 gb drive?

Accepted Answer

I don't see why not but how do you even have such a small drive...  Not even usbs are that small anymore.  Either way I don't have definitive proof that it will work since I have 4 1TB drives plugged into it

Question 7

Does this card come with two mountng brackets? (low profile and standard atx)

Accepted Answer

Yes, the card comes with both brackets -- the standard bracket is attached, unscrew 2 screws and you can swap to the low profile bracket.

Question 8

Can two of these cards be used simultaneously on the same system, or will the chips conflict?

Accepted Answer

Don't know for sure about two of these cards, but I am running this card and a Promise Raid controller card in the same machine for two years with no conflicts.   I'm not raiding any drives.  The machine is  a home media server with eight 6GB HDD.  Four drives are connected to the Promise raid controller, the other four drives  are the backup drives and are connected to the SYBA controller.  On large file copies (up to 3TB) I get sustain throughput of about 160 MB/second from the Promise controller to the SYBA controller. I can't think of any reason why two SYBA cards would be any different   Hope this helps.

Question 9

Does this support Windows 10 64 bit?

Accepted Answer

It does on my machine.

Question 10

Will this card work in a PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot?

Accepted Answer

Yes.  as I understand things, so will any other PC! X 4 device.

Questions & Answers