Customer Reviews

Syba SD-SATA-4P Serial ATA150 4x Ports RAID Controller Card with SIL3114 Chipset - Retail

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Installed it a few days ago and it's working fine. Leaflet "manual" that comes in the box had the 32 bit driver folder name wrong but I let the install wizard pick and it runs. (has drivers for 32 and 64 bit installs). It was a little tough to snap into the PCI socket but went in solid with some pushing. My 1TB WD Caviar Green is running through the card and no probs.

I have only had the card for a short time but so far so good.
The card is currently installed in Ubuntu 9.10 system and works fine.

Using this card in Ubuntu 10.10. Works out of the box. I have 4x500GB drives. I'm sharing with XBMC using Samba. Works great.

I just installed this card in an old Dell E510 that I use as a HTPC. After booting I noticed in Device Manager the yellow warning. I right clicked and updated the driver with the latest Windows 7 driver from SybaUsa and everything worked great. It's nice to get a card with good drivers. I hooked up Dvd drive, bluray drive, and two Esata cables to external hard drives. I noticed that Syba responds rapidly to email questions on their products.

I wanted to add SATA capacity to a PC I was building from scratch for my 10 year old son and decided on this product because of the high reviews it received. The adapter took a little more force to pop into the mobo expansion slot. I downloaded the most recent drivers available from the manufacturer's web site as a matter of practice. Installing the drivers was problematic because the RAID driver kept being configured even though I would repeatedly select the non-RAID configuration. Using the drivers on the included CD resulted in the same RAID driver being installed. After three hours of unsuccessful attempts, I set aside the adapter for possible use later in a RAID configuration.

This review is from a non-technical perspective, and is a general how-to on installing this card without using RAID on a Windows XP...

1. Insert 4x port SATA/PCI card into mobo, but do NOT connect any peripherals via SATA, boot PC
2. Go to the indicated support website and download both the IDE BIOS (b5500) and the latest non-RAID driver (see instruction manual for web address)
3. Flash the non-RAID BIOS...
- control panel > administrative tools > computer management > device manager > SCSI and RAID controllers > Silicon Image Sil 3114*** (double click)
- find "Flash BIOS" tab, browse for b5500.bin file, and "program flash"
4. Install the non-RAID driver
- find "Driver" tab at the top of the same window previously pulled up to Flash BIOS, select "Update Driver", Choose the advanced option (specific install location), then click "Have Disk", at which point browse to the previously downloaded driver folder and drill down, pick the only file shown.
5. Restart, enjoy (whew)!

I was trying to put a sata drive in a win xp 64 system for a buddy with this controller. He wanted to boot off the sata drive. If I was booted into xp64 I could install the drivers just fine, but when I tried to do a fresh install of xp64 on the sata drive the install refused to recognize the drivers.
I ended up finding a freeware disk cloning program and I cloned the xp install from the IDE drive to the sata drive.
Life is good now, but I messed around with the thing for hours before I thought of this solution.
I suppose you get what you pay for.

After using a two channel SATA controller I found the need for more ports. This one provides extra capacity, and maintains ease of installation and flawless driver operation and integrates well with other SATA and IDE controllers installed on the same machine.

My motherboard only has two SATA ports. I bought this, removed the full-height faceplate and plugged it into my half-height slot with no problem. I needed more SATA drives and this works perfectly. Win7 pro even had the right drivers. I did not try RAID nor is my boot drive connected to this but thats not why i bought it. Bottom line: More slaves for under $10.

I had received a HP Proliant ML330 G3 with a broken power supply. Replaced it, worked fine, but doesn't natively support SATA of any form. It does, however, have PCI-X 64 bit slots (you know, the ones that are double the size of the regular PCI 2.1/2.2 slots) which can handle a theoretical 1064 MB/s (wikipedia) with a full sized card.... roughly 4 times that of a standard PCI card, such at the one being reviewed. The cheapest I could find was $50 and Amazon said it would ship in 1-3 Months. Long story short, I was impatient and didn't want to wait. I'm currently using this card... popped it in, no conflicts with existing hardware, nestles itself inbetween all the various POSTs from different hardware on boot. I'm using it as a data backup server with 2-1TB Hard drives in Raid 1 configuration. Back ups are done over the network so data transfer to the hard drives through the card is not the bottle neck.... ie it's more the sufficient for what I want it to do. Oh, and did I mention, it comes with SATA cables... I ordered extra figuring for the price it couldn't possibly include them...but I was wrong, it does include them.

The only hang up is with a clean installation with Windows Server 2008 (32 bit). The problem is clearly with Windows as I had to play around with order of installing the drivers so both RAID cards (there is one built into the mobo) would be recognized. I think I had to install the on-board RAID drivers first, click next, then when it asked for more drivers, I installed the Syba card's drivers. I did not try putting both drivers on one disc. That might help.

Benchmark (keep in mind, hard drives have a lot to do with the results) with PC Wizard:
Sequential Write 38.14 MB/s
Sequential Read 89.44 MB/s
Buffered Write 44.32 MB/s
Buffered Read 94.67 MB/s
Random Read 50.00 MB/s

The card has been working for a month now, zero problems. Very happy.