I LOVE the SATA speeds this card provides me in my older PC. It comes with some nice driver and RAID controller software.
For the price and the features this card is fine but there are a few things I would have liked to have known.
I would have like to have known that although there are 2 SATA ports and one eSATA port, the eSATA port shares the same address as one of the SATA ports, thus making this a 2 port card because you can't use one of the SATA ports if you use the eSATA port. Can't use all 3 ports. It says this in the box. It would have also been nice if they told me which SATA port can't be used when using the eSATA port. Trial and error seems to show me it is the side SATA port which can't be used; the top one is the dedicated SATA port.
I didn't realize that the extra speed this gives me in copying files would max out my old PC's CPU. nothing else works while this is copying. Not the fault of the card, of course, but given that this is a PCI card, and not an ePCI card, I would imagine most users that buy this card (and give up the faster SATA speeds of an ePCI bus) have older CPUs that will be stressed. Now it is the CPU that is the bottle neck for copying; not the drive connection.
Also even when not copying there is something that takes up a lot of my CPU time. Especially when it has first booted up, it takes about 5 minutes to settle down. I think it is the RAID software or some of the drivers or something. I need to play with this a bit and install the absolute minimum to make it work.
I have a similar card in a newer PC (but still no ePCI slots) and it does not affect the performance of the PC at all of course. So all in all the card seems to be a great 2 port PCI card for SATA drives with nice software.
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