Question 1

Has anyone been able to use the driver listed on Syba site to work on Windows 7x64? I tried but it refuses to recognize the driver and looking online I found some site indicating another driver from Marvell is needed but so far can't find the driver to test or see why.

Accepted Answer

I have this card but I am using it with Windows 8. When you download the driver- download the 92XX driver and it has a folder inside which will have the drivers for Windows 7. Use device manager ->
1. IDE ATA CONTROLLERS then click the
2.  1st STANDARD SATA AHCI CONTROLLER:
3.  right click that and install driver from the folder you extracted it to. It will work. You will need to do this every time you reinstall your OS so keep the driver file handy.
It is the way tech support at Syba told me to do it.
Hope this helps.

Question 2

Will this card let me add 8 extra hdds or ssds in my case?

Accepted Answer

This card will let you add up to eight HDDs or SSDs, up to 2TB, it will not connect 3TB units, unless Syba comes out with a software revision.

It plugged into my system easily, and was recognized during the boot process, very easy to use.

Art

Question 3

Anyone have this card working with FreeNAS?

Accepted Answer

I have been using this since 2013 - but do not have it in a FreeNAS setup. It works really great in my computer case. Have had no problems with it at all. I have all 8 ports attached to various drives and never a problem. I am thinking of getting a smaller version for some additional drives I want to add to my case.

I would assume it would work equally as good in a FreeNAS as well. Hope this will help.

Question 4

Does it support 5tb/6tb/8tb drives?

Accepted Answer

I have a total of 15 5TB drives hooked up to the Rosewill server case using 2 of these cards (and a single CF Card with a SATA adapter being the lone drive connected to the MB. I can attest that yes it does indeed work. But the drives must be initialized with GPT instead of MBR. In my setup I run software

Question 5

Does this card support port multiplier enclosures?

Accepted Answer

I can't say for sure I know I was able to get the first 4 port to work but couldn't get the second 4 ports to work. I can say for sure but that this card will not work with multiplier enclosures because of it's hardware configuration. I know I tried to put it into a 16x slot to get the other 4 ports to work but wasn't able to get it to work. It could've been my board configuration didn't allow it to work properly. I want and used the previous generation Syba 4 port card of which I used two and they worked fine in my system. But I couldn't get the 8 port of which only the first 4 port worked the other port had conflicts with my system board so I couldn't get the other 4 port to work or be recognized. I did contact Syba in the past about it and I think it was not made for a multiplier configuration.

Question 6

Does this work with VMWare ESXi 5? I couldn't find the chipset for this.

Accepted Answer

Not by default. VMWare 5 removed some drivers for commodity Nics and SATA controllers. But, the good news is that it looks like you can get this to work by following the instructions here: http://www.v-front.de/2013/11/how-to-make-your-unsupported-sata-ahci.html

Question 7

Do drives connected to this work with Windows Storage Spaces found in Windows 8 and Windows 10?  Also, does it support the new 8 TB drives?

Accepted Answer

I am running seagate archive 8tb hard drives on this card.

Question 8

Can you plug in more than one and have all the drives on the same array? 
(Please forgive the noob question.)

Accepted Answer

This was not a raid card, if I am right your thinking of putting multiple drives on it and doing a raid where the OS only sees one drive.  This will let you put in 8 different size hard drives and they will show up as 8 different hard drives in the system.  If I understand your question right.

Question 9

(1)I have a gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 running win 8.1, will this be compatible with my system.
(2) Will I be able to access and use (transfer files from) all 8 drives at once, individually, if so will it affect transfer speeds if i'm accessing 8 drives at once?

Accepted Answer

I have this card. It has worked very well with Windows 8; I tried windows 8.1 and had problems with it I don't know if it was because of this card or the OS itself. I went back to Windows 8 and have had no other problems.

The card seems to work very well. I have had no problems with it. I do not know about using all 8 at one time. But for all the moving and copying of files that I have done to the connected drives it works excellently. I would expect that things would slow down a bit if you were transferring with all 8 drives at the same time. I have transferred to two at a time and it did seem a little slower. So all 8 would be a noticeable slow down. I have 14 drives in my case all of them Seagate 1.5TB or 2TB. 
 I would definitely buy a second one if needed.

Question 10

I'm looking for to 15 or 16 sata ports for raid cards in a un-raid system?  I'm wondering if. I can use 2 of these cards in IT mode or is there a 16 port Raid card. I plan to use sata 6gb speed and like 3tb hard drives

Accepted Answer

I haven't seen a 16 port card.   No sure what IT mode is.  I presume if you have the PCIe slots you should be able to use two of these cards. There are definite throughput limits on this card.
I would suggest that you read the posts at the Un-Raid forum for information. See forums{.}unraid{.}net and search for this card.
One final note.  I am running a UEFI secure boot and when I go into the bios I always get an error message about incompatible hardware from this card.  I am currently researching updating the firmware at Fernando's Win-Raid forum.  Hope this helps.

Questions & Answers