PCIE SATA Card 8 port

Plugged it in, and it just worked on a Windows machine. Nice to also receive 8 SATA cables, a power extension cable, and a short (SFF) card-slot bracket option. My only teeny ding would be that all the cables were one color and all 20'' (no longer cables). But that's being really picky!

I want an inexpensive JBOD controller for desktop hard drives, and this card seems to fit the bill. Too bad it doesn't work properly. This is the second of two similar PCIe SATA add-on cards I've tried that both suffer from unreliable SATA port links to drives. Ports may or may-not work, seemingly randomly. For example, a drive that's not detected on one port will be detected if connected to another port, but this may cause a previously working drive on a third port to stop working. Not working means that drives may or may not be detected at BIOS POST, and if detected a drive may appear but be unreliable after the system is booted, disconnecting or stalling during operation. It's not the cables nor the drives. Trying various combinations of ports, the problem is the ports on this card, maybe signal integrity issues? Read others' reviews and you will hear similar stories. OTOH, many reviewers seem pleased. Maybe there's a serious batch problem with these inexpensive cards? Whatever the case may be, two similar-design but different offerings are unreliable for me. The word on the web is to spend 2x and get an LSI-based SAS HBA, which will be backward compatible with SATA. SAS HBA are typical for PC servers, and generally considered to be reliable, with better cabling and options like HW RAID. Some aspects to consider are UEFI vs legacy BIOS boot support (Option ROM), PCIe bus revision, modern IOMMU support, aggregate bandwidth to ports, hot-plug, HW RAID options, and of course OS compatibility.

I neeed extra SATA ports, this PCI to SATA converter did the trickl, works well, no need to load drivers, windows 11 assigned drivers and it works great.

Card works well after you install the correct drivers. Whatever windows 11 puts on by default causes strange behavior. It'll only detect drives in specific ports with the default driver, and if you move ports around you disable other ports somehow. I was never able to get more than 3 drives working with the default driver. The trick to make this work as expected is to install the marvell 9215 controller drivers (I had the 8 port card, ymmv). I had to look up the hardware IDs to figure out what driver to use. The other downside is that ports 1 and 2 are unusable on a low profile box as they point up and don't have enough room for cables to plug into it because of where the panel has to go for the case. But, after you figure out the driver issue, the card works well and has decent performance.

I needed this for the extra drives I'm using for a software raid. Works perfectly - haven't had a single problem with it.

This controller might be OK for a gamer or casual user, but it's not reliable for real work. I've had the 8-port version of this card for 6 months, running under Windows Server OS. Even out of the box 2 of the ports did not work - anything plugged in there would not be recognized. I decided just to use the rest and not bother with a refund. Today another port stopped working: the SSD had been up and running for a week, new OS installed, then all of a sudden after reboot it entirely disappeared. I tried shutting down a few times, never came back. Thankfully the SSD was OK. I removed this controller and replaced it with a known brand that has never given me trouble. You get what you pay for.

Card died after just 6 months. Not sure if there is a warranty. I will update once I contact the seller.

Windows 11 will not recognize it. No drivers to download from website. I'm not sure about windows 10.