SYBA SY-PCI40037 SATA II (3.0Gb/s) 1:5 (5x1) Port Multiplier PCI Mounting Card

Pros: Card does work as port mult with onboard Sil 3132 (not sure about add-in cards, but it should work)

Cons: Tech support was not very helpful when trying to figure out what this card would work with. Item description does not show that the MOTHERBOARD MUST SUPPORT PORT MULT. Good luck finding out if your MB does in fact support PM. Should come with the JMicron Utility - do a search for JMB36X_WinDrv_R1.17.63_WHQL.zip to find it. I got it from "Patriot Convoy 425XL support" (it uses the same JMicron chipset)

Overall Review: I got this card to work as a port mult after installing on an old LanParty UT590 board that has onboard Sil 3132. I'm running WS2008r2 Hyper-V with several VMs. Did not want to RAID as yet, or go JBOD. Tried to get it to work with the Syba PEX 40040 card (Asmedia chip) but would not work for port mult. (tech suppoert said it wouldn't, but I'm hard-headed) Took off an egg due to the hassle I went through to get this card working the way I wanted.

Pros: I picked up three of these cards and put into my media server. Each of these cards has 5 1TB drives tied to it, and tied back into the motherboards onboard controller. Using the motherboards on board controller, I created a raid 0 using 3 ports. I was surprised at how well it works for setting up a 12TB usable, where I can lose one drive on any array and still have full access to my data.

Cons: It is a sata II port multiplier, so using this I'm limited to 3Gb/s (384 megaBYTES max, but I'm only observing ~340) on my controller which is somewhat unfortunate, but I knew that when I purchased it and accepted that for the price, I was going to get plenty of performance.

Pros: First and foremost, it is a HARDWARE RAID controller. It really is next to impossible to find one at this price point. Not that having a software controller is the end of the world with today's CPUs, but if the controller can do the job on it's own, no need for the CPU. Install is easy, it worked right out the box in my setup.

Cons: It has dip switches. Ugh. I thought this was 2011, not 1991! Also, no on-board BIOS for the controller. If you have an older MB that isn't port multiplier aware, (mine is in an old box with an ECS motherboard that is about 4 years old) the drives or arrays just show up as regular drives without SMART or any means of checking drive health. Which means you are flying blind on knowing when a drive is about to fail until it happens. Which incidentally did happen to me about ten days after installing this card (lucky me!). At that point, since I had a 3 drive RAID 5 and I had no hot spare, the array went offline (also curious, since I've never had that happen in another other scenario). No drives were detected other than the OS drive, not part of the array, and the card flashed a constant red light. Currently waiting for a replacement drive from WD (which was a replacement of a drive that failed 2 weeks prior, but that's another story...).

Overall Review: From the above, I verified the bad drive by plugging them in one at a time with the same cable. Overall, I can't complain. It's low priced and it does the job a $200 hardware card would do for about 1/4 the price.

Pros: Cheap Easy to use Very Fast for RAID5

Cons: Mediocre documentation, does not work at all with SIL3132 card and Silicon Image RAID management software

Overall Review: Easy to setup RAID5, reads & writes at ~185MBytes/sec between a Seagate 3TB 6Gb/s drive and five Samsung 2TB drives in a RAID5 configuration using ECS A75F-M FM1 motherboard. Deliberately replaced a 2TB drive in the RAID5 with an empty 2TB to test the auto rebuild function, the entire set is invisible to win7 until its completely rebuilt. My hunch was correct that auto rebuild process can be done offline with a standalone power supply, and it took 6 hours to rebuild the RAID5 with 420GB of stored data. Total RAID5 capacity seen by WIN7 is 8TB, and the SY-PCI40037 spec said it rebuilds at 200GB/Hour, so 6 hours is for rebuilding the entire 8TB capacity, or just the 420GB stored data? Either way, math didn't compute. System has a SIL3132 card with Silicon Image RAID management software installed. RAID5 works with SATA III connector on the motherboard, but not the SIL3132 card, not seen at all by WIN7 nor RAID management software. So much for "Supports PM Aware and Non-PM Aware Host

Pros: Popped it in a it worked great, works better if you make sure you plug in the power connector also. ;) Tech support answer my questions in a timely manner via email

Cons: Install instructions need to be a little better.

Overall Review: Will keep you posted on the product over time

Pros: Small compact toggle switches multiple functionalities between RAIDs easy to set up easy to maintain works on all operating systems (XP / 7 / 8 / 10) Windows Server ( 2008 / 2012 / 2016)

Cons: None so far

Overall Review: For the value we can’t beat it

Pros: -hardware raid -S.M.A.R.T. -raid 0, 1, 3, 5, 10, LARGE, CLONE -software adds many features -does not require PCI slot -works well with multiple units in a rackmount enclosure, software manages all cards/drives. -fast performance for SATA II -write cache -easy to see status LED's with software to find physical connections(click a button to find physical drive port) -raid modes work with ANY system, even external enclosures.

Cons: -no live expansion -software/firmware is final with no updates -SATA II, not SATA III -no ZFS (partial limitation with ZFS itself. ZFS doesn't work with raid cards intercepting data from drive) -no alarm for drive failure, yet software has broken buzzer toggle -poor documentation unless you find the website documents -no boot environment. needs software to get full function

Overall Review: bought this used on EB , but was practically undamaged. I didn't expect as much functionality as was provided, based on previous reviews After getting the software my options were significantly expanded, and I don't even have to restart the computer to do anything. Don't expect to use this controller with SSD's. the SATA II interface for it is significantly bottlenecked. this controller is aimed for large NAS'es or media servers, with the ability to run such configs as raid-10 or raid-50 with another card. If I had the money or need, I would love to test buying a second card and make a raid-50 with a SATA III port multiplier-based raid-0 card. would make an amazing external USB 3.0 jumbo backup box. lol I think of those kind of crazy ideas.

Pros: No driver needed, easy configuration, NO PCI SLOT NEEDED.

Cons: None!!!!

Overall Review: I installed this in my WHS2011 server to take 4x640GB drives into a single RAID 5 stripe. It has worked like a champ and speed tests exceed those of the SIIG SATA RAID card that originally connected these drives. No special drivers needed and just one of the best RAID products for the price I have purchased in years.