Customer Reviews

Sabrent SBT-SRD4 Silicon Image RAID Native Serial ATA 4 Ports PCI Controller Host Card Adapter

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

 

 

I bought this controller to support a single new Seagate 7200.11 1TB SATA drive.
I had no intention of using it in a RAID configuration.

As delivered the card would not recognise the drive and my
PC would not boot, hanging at the SATA disk detection screen.
This card comes with some pretty old Silicon Image firmware.
Googling I discovered that there is much newer firmware available
from SII. I downloaded the current non-RAID firmware from SII
but it wouldn't install from win XP. I finally managed to install
the new firmware by setting up a USB stick to boot the PC into
FreeDOS, then flashing the new firmware from DOS.

The card now detects the Seagate drive and works correctly
except for one issue: If I cold-boot the PC with a reset or power
cycle all is well, but if I issue a re-start from winXP the card
will still hang at the disk detect screen. This is only a minor
annoyance, however.

Overall the card is cheap and it does work but only when upgraded
to current firmware.

Thanks to the simple, no conflict operation of these Serial ATA PCI Controllers, I now run 10, 500 GB hard drives in my server, with all exhibiting excellent performance and no problems to date. I would recommend these to anyone requiring RAID configurations or massive storage needs. Kudos!

Linux support is listed, but could not make work on my system (Fedora 10 x86_64). The driver cd was a mess (disorganized), and targeted at building support into a 2.4 kernel. My 2.6 kernel has module support for the chipset on the card (Silicon Image 2114), but got no signs that the card was even connected. Returned.

Bought this card to run my software RAID 5 on my file server. Within 2-3 months the ports started to fail. its still in use but i only have one DVD drive connected so it is seeing very light duty.

Installed the card in a home-built Freenas box, then tried to find an update to the on-board firmware at Silicon Graphics - Couldn't find one that worked in Windows or DOS. None of the choices from the text menus seemed to match the actual board type. Pressed on despite the lack of update, and Freenas recognized the drives just fine. I setup a software Z-Raid array of 4 drives with no problems. (To avoid the usual problems with software Raid arrays, my boot drive was a more reliable CF IDE drive)
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The card has worked with no problems for the past month - I have fiddled with my array a few times and even rebuilt the array once as an experiment to see what a future disk failure would look like. As long as you are aware of the disk-size limitations, this is a VERY affordable raid card for old Sata Drives under 500GB.

As described this product does the job. If you are going to install windows home server on the drives connected with this raid card you will need to dig around for alternative drivers because the drivers that come with it do not work. Works perfectly with Linux (Ubuntu Server, Freenas, etc.)

Speed is probably going to be limited by your PCI bus. Had no complaints with speed with disks arranged w/ RAID or w/o RAID. If you putting this in headless unit detecting RAID failure will be extremely difficult.

Useless, does not work, no manual, not even a "README" on the cd, card looks used, too expensive to ship it back. I'll just keep the cables

This product is not recognized as being installed. Installed both the Sabrent and Syba drivers... and nothing. Even had the card replaced and still nothing. Simply was not detected by the system.

Windows sees card fine but drivers wont install have surfed the internet trying to find drivers that work waste of money and to expensive to ship back no more amazon for where do i cancel.

I DID RECIEVE MY ITEM ON TIME AND WAS IN EXCELLENT CONDITION THANK YOU VERY MUCH