SYBA SY-PEX40039 2 Port SATA III PCI-e 2.0 x1 Card

Pros: UPDATE April 2017: Please see Other Thoughts below. Adds 2 extra SATA ports to your system at low cost. Upgrades older SATA II systems from 280MB/s max. speed up to 380MB/s.

Cons: none at the price

Overall Review: UPDATE April 2017: Some users experience problems so here are some tips. 1. There are so many different motherboards and chipsets - this card will work with most of them if you install it correctly. 2. Windows "generic" drivers often work best with this card instead of the maker's "Asmedia" drivers. So, always let Windows install drivers first and see if that works for you. 3. This card was designed back in the Windows 7 days. I have used it with Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 on motherboards made by ASUS, ASRock, Intel, and ECS. These were all with Intel cpus. 4. Make sure the card is fully seated / plugged into one of the very short PCI-e x1 slots (not the older, longer PCI slot). 5. Don't connect a drive immediately. Plug in the card and boot up the computer. Let Windows install generic drivers, then restart the computer. AFTER Windows has fully booted up check that the card appears in Device Manager and that there isn't a yellow exclamation mark beside it. This confirms that the card is properly installed and recognised by Windows. Then, shutdown the computer fully and connect a drive or drives to the SATA port(s) on the card. 6. If you are connecting a boot drive (a drive that has your operating system on it) you MUST go into the BIOS (or UEFI) IMMEDIATELY when you power on the computer. Usually, this is done by pressing the either F2 key or DELETE key. Check your motherboard user manual if in doubt. In the BIOS go to the BOOT tab or screen and make sure your boot drive is selected as the 1st drive or Primary drive. Then select Save and Exit in the BIOS menu (or hit F10 key). Failure to do this may cause Windows to not boot up, and may even corrupt the Master Boot Record (MBR). 7. This card has a single "lane" of bandwidth so your SSD maximum Sequential Read speed will top out somewhere around 380MB/s to 410MB/s depending on the motherboard. If you want faster speed, consider using a card rated as "x2" or higher. That means it has 2 lanes of bandwidth and can go faster. It also costs more. And, it plugs into an x4 slot or bigger because motherboards don't actually have x2 slots, OK? This point has been made clear before but some users still buy the card then complain of the speed limitation. Do your homework before you buy! 8. Some reviewers mentioned disappointing speeds of around 210MB/s or less. They mentioned motherboards such as Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R and ASUS P6T. Please note that these boards' PCI-e x1 slots are the old PCI-e rev.1.0 and are, therefore, only half the speed of PCI-e rev.2. (Many boards from that era have a PCI-e x16 slot which is PCI-e rev.2, but they cheap out on the x1 slots!) The rev.1 cuts the speed in half compared to rev.2. An example of the faster cards would be SYBA SD-PEX40054 which is available here at Newegg and there are many others. Don't forget to boot into BIOS after connecting a boot drive to this card and make sure it is selected as the "first boot device"; otherwise, Windows won't boot up!

Pros: Decent speed for the price. Faster than SATA 2, but not by too much. Good enough for what you need if you're willing to buy something in the lowest possible price range. This is a low-budget card. Deal with it. And it's easy enough to install, theoretically speaking.

Cons: No BIOS configuration required / possible. This is a CON if you want to flash the firmware or anything. It's not relevant to me, but if your boot drive is on this thing and there is an important firmware update, I don't see how you'll be able to do that... They seem to have QC issues. I had to RMA one (through newegg) before I got a working card. And here's the kicker, and this is worth at least one egg (I was contemplating 3/5, and if I could, I'd give it 3.5 eggs): The bracket does not fit. Check the other reviews, this is a ubiquitous problem. Cases have a standard size. Every card I have ever owned since the 80s has fit the case correctly. Hundreds (possibly thousands, possibly over nine thousand) of cards, and I have NEVER (until today) seen a card where the bracket refuses to fit into a case. This blows my mind. When you insert the PCIe connector correctly, the bracket is at an angle with your case. When you align the bracket with your case, the PCIe connector is skewed and not making good contact. You can't possible push the bracket all the way in, meaning you can't use the screw on the bracket to secure it to the case. As an added bonus, this is going in your 1.x slot, right? That's right above your expensive graphics card right? Be prepared to fry your graphics card because his bracket hangs too low and will MAKE CONTACT WITH THE BACK SIDE OF THE PCB ON YOUR GRAPHICS CARD. Good luck explaining to NVIDIA or whoever mfrd your card that you fried it due to some other card having a messed up bracket that shorted it out. Tell them you a return/exchange. That will happen exactly ... never.

Overall Review: This is a cheap card. It's made with standard, cheap, inexpensive parts. The only thing Syba needs to do here is put them together so they work. Based on the reviews here, that happens somewhat frequently. Great. It does what it needs to when things work right. But I suspect they spend less than a dollar to make this card and only 0.22 cents of that dollar is for the stupid metal bracket that goes on the back. They need to QC this stuff so that it actually fits into people's PCs. Assembly and QC should be the mainstay of manufacturing low-budget hardware, and Syba is messing this up royally if a significant fraction of users can't even get this to fit their PCs because the bracket isn't attached to the PCB properly. I pulled the bracket off, cannibalized an old USB 3.0 card for its bracket, and used only one screw to get it on the PCB of this SYBA card (it will stay in place when the PCIe connector is in too without skewing). This is a ridiculous problem to have to deal with, but if you're willing to be a little bit creative, it won't be too much of a problem. This card is small enough that if you don't ever tip or bump your PC, you might not even need a bracket -- but I wouldn't take that risk (see above: graphics card is right underneath this card for most users, myself included).

Pros: The installation of this PCI-Express card was simple, open case, insert into PCI-E 1x slot, tighten screw, connect a SATA cable between the card and hard disk. My use was to add additional ports, since my MythTV server running on Ubuntu was maxed out at 6 hard disks. No software was needed, the disk was easily found in Ubuntu Linux. The full performance of a 6 Gbps was not my first concern, since data rates would not be maximized on the spinning drive.

Cons: None for my needs in Ubuntu Linux.

Overall Review: Good reviews, so see others for Windows usage.

Pros: Fits well in the slot, cables fit well on the SATA connectors. Works fine with Windows 7- 64bit Works fine with Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3 motherboard

Cons: none

Overall Review: haven't done any speed tests, but file transfer speed seems as expected.

Pros: This card was not advertised to work with linux but I had no issues getting my Ubuntu 12.04 desktop linux version to recognize it. Tested the card and it does recognize SATA I, II and III type hard drives.

Cons: None

Overall Review: I am using this card to add 2 extra SATA III (6Gb/s) ports to my HP mini tower. My native SATA ports on the motherboard are SATA II. Not sure if this card had any software or fake RAID capabilities but that didn't matter to me. I later upgraded my Ubuntu version to the latest 13.05 (I think that is right) and the card continues to work as normal. I have two 4TB hard drives attached to the card acting as an 8TB volume using LVM on Ubuntu. Decided to use LVM but software RAID in linux should of also worked it I wanted to go that route.

Pros: It's all about the chipset, and the ASMedia ASM1061 on this card is a winner. It's fast and reliable. I bought this to improve stability; my motherboard's onboard Marvell SE9128 controller was occasionally giving me driver bluescreens. The really pleasant surprise is that Payday 2 no longer stutters! I didn't realize how much the Marvell was holding my system back.

Cons: Only 2 ports, but that's the best you can do for full-speed SATAIII in a PCI-E x1 slot.

Overall Review: Not all Syba cards are good -- look at the chipset before you buy! I'm actually using this in a PCI-E x16 slot; you don't need a longer card to use a longer slot.

Pros: Used ASM 1061 6GB/s chip. Connected drives are bootable in Win7, Win8, and Win10, 200 GB/s 4K and 400 GB/s 16MB for Corsair, Crucial, Seagate, and OCZ SSD. I got it to work for HP Z400,, HP Z800, Dell T5400, various old HP workstations and desktops, and old Lenovo desktops that use Intel CPUs. Got it for $11 per at Newegg.com on sale and it works better than the cheaper knock-off generic ASM1061 cards.

Cons: Requires 1 PCIe version 2 or higher slot. PCIe v2 slot bandwith is 500 GB/s whereas v1 is 250 GB/s so with overhead (effectively 1 byte for 10 bits after corrections and handshakes), your SSD speed will top out at 420 MB/s if installed in PCIe v2 slot and 200 MB/s if installed in PCIe v1 slot. Must install the newest ASM 1061 driver to work well in Windows 10. I could not optimize a Corsair SSD until I installed the new Win10 driver 3.1.60 from station-drivers website.

Overall Review: It is very important that this card is installed in a PCIe v2 or higher slot. Most people do not realize that at least one or two of their new motherboards are PCIe V1 (meaning 250GB/s max bandwidth). You have to either read the manual for the correct motherboard layout, read the PCI info in BIOS setup screen, or read the white print labeling directly on the motherboard itself. I am a highly technical person and it took me a few hours to figure the above out. Also must install newest 3.1.60 driver from station-drivers which oddly makes the OS sees the SSD as removable USB drive. I have not try the option of removing the bootable SSD drive to find out what could happened. I wrote this review again because this Syba card is a great card and I have installed at least 12 ASM1061 chipset cards including 6 Syba brand cards. It is unfortunate that some people got bad results due to their installation setup.

Pros: Low cost, simply works, revives older hardware

Cons: Only PCI-e, only two SATA ports

Overall Review: This is a follow up to an earlier review. If you use Disk Imaging Software (i.e. Acronis, Ghost, EaseUS Todo, etc) you need to know that if you need to do a restore, your Imaging software may not be able to recognize you Boot Drive (normally C-Drive) with your drive connected to this controller. The "trick" to making it work, is to first have created a Boot Media/Win PE boot disk. Then shut your computer down and connect your boot drive to the one of the motherboard SATA Connectors (Probably SATA 0 or SATA 1 depending on how they are numbered). Now boot up and go into BIOS and make sure your boot drive is set to IDE/Compatibility mode (instead of AHCI or RAID) if it isn't already that way to begin with (mine was) and put in your Boot Media Disk. Now boot into your boot media disk. You'll find your Imaging software now recognizes the boot drive and you will now be able to perform your restore successfully. Note: Depending on your Disk imaging software, you software might actually "see" the boot drive, but when you go to actually do the restore, it tells you it now can't see the boot drive or can't restore to it. If your Imaging software offers the option of shutting down the computer after the restore is complete, choose that option as you will need to move your SATA cable from the motherboard back on to the PEX-40039 controller card. Assuming the restore was successful, your computer will boot up perfectly. As you can probably guess, I have run across this problem and have now figure out the work around and wanted to share it with you to make sure you don't blame the PEX-40039 for the problem, since the problem lies with the imaging software not having the correct driver for this controller card built in.