Question 1

Hi there,

What is the MAX Hard Drive Capacity that will work with this card?

Also what is the link for the Non-Raid BIOS for those of us that only wish to use this card as an additional drive controller without raid.

Accepted Answer

Not sure about capacity but I have a 1tb drive attached.

No need to flash different BIOS, the one there works regular or RAID, you just have to set option in BIOS for concatation rather than RAID.

Question 2

Will this work with Windows 8?

Accepted Answer

Nothing works with Win-8. That's why Microsoft replaced it.

Question 3

First off, does this card come with a low profile bracket, or can one be added? I probably have one that came with a low profile package that came with several, or can use the one that shipped with a Rosewill RC-212 if need be. Am tempted to use it, but it's only SATA-1.

Secondly, will this card work in a Dell Optiplex 740 Desktop Edition? Not the SFF, the mid-sized desktop. I'm looking to bypass the fake SATA-2 ports, which shows on a SSD as IDE, to add a true SATA-2 card & the drives be shown as SATA.

I'll be installing Windows 7, and this PC can boot from a card, have an Intel 330 SSD I'd like to stick in here. It has the Intel SSD Toolbox option, which will allow me to run TRIM as often as needed.

The SATA-2 performance on the MB ports are pitiful, Crystal Disk Benchmark shows Sequential Read speeds of 73.33 & Writes of 66.40MB/sec & 4K is a joke. The HDD is a WD Caviar Blue w/8MB cache, running at 7200 rpm. Am a bit surprised that the WEI shows 5.9.

At any rate, I need better performance than what the NVIDIA controlled ports can deliver & need true SATA at a low cost.

Accepted Answer

No low profile bracket, but easy to add one, or even simply remove the regular one and go without.

This is a pretty long card, not sure it would fit in a low profile Dell Optiplex 740

As well, it's performance when I had it plugged into a regular PCI slot was poor - it only really shines when plugged into a PCI-X slot.

Tyan Tiger MPX with 2xMP2400 CPU's and a new 1tb 7200 SATA III HD

CrystalDisk seq r/w: PCI-X slot:219/213, PCI slot: 58/20

no doubt would be better PCI performance on a newer mobo, but you see the difference.

I suspect you can find a lot of PCI-only cards that are better suited for your specific needs.

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