I/O Crest 4 Port SATA III PCI-e 2.0 x2 HyperDuo RAID Card Marvell 9230 Chipset SI-PEX40057

Ok, I needed to get me some SATA ports. I am running a Ass P7P55-D Pro mother board. I had a couple of SSD that were running very poorly A Liteonit 256 GB and Samsung 930 pro both were benchmarking barley faster than good hard drivers. 250 mbs range both of themSo I found this card, it looked good, the reviews were mostly good. I bought it.I had been running a dual boot Win 7 pro sp1 64 and Win 8.1.1 pro.Documentation sucks as is expected these daysI installed the card in PCIe 2.0 16 slot, rebooted. ........................................ guess what my dual boot is busted ok Restored a Image I created just before installing the card. Still no boot. So I take the card out boot. No win 8 boot no win7 boot. Reinstall Images again. boot still nothing booting. So Im tryihg to figure out what went wrong. I read a question on this card Brad I think also has the same Mother Board. And had no problems. After really reading what he did I think I found my error. These board have 2 port SATA 3 Driven by Marvell drivers!!!!!!Ok I go into my BIOS and Disable the 2 Marvell SATA 3 portsTry to boot nothing working.Clean Samsung 830 SSD, convert it to MBR format NTFS, Clean Install Windows 7 sp1 Pro 64 no problems boots up.I move one of my hard drives that doesn't have important data on it to the new card.Boot up it hooks right up. Cool. Go to Device Manager find Marvel Controller In other devices with the Big yellow ? Right click browse to the Marvell XX99 drivers for Vista, win7, win 8 Installed no problems Look in system devices you'll see Marvell Unify Configuration.shut down put 1 of my 1GB WD Black on. Boot up looking good except I'm plugged into port 2 and 3. So for those of you that won't know this the 2 port away from and parallel to the mother board left to right 0 and 1 the two ports perpendicular are 2 and 3.So now I have my Liteonit 256 GB SSD on port 0, the 2 1gb WD Blacks on 1 and 2 leaving port 3 for my Samsung 830 pro SSDSo I then move my clean installed Win7 sp1 Pro on Samsung 830 Pro SSD to the 3 port. Boot to my BIOS change the first drive to the Samsung 830 and set the same up for boot priority 3rd actual USB the DVD the Samsung 830Boot up Win 7 runs perfect.Clean Installed Windows 8.11 pro to my Liteonit 256gb SSD on Port 0 of the card. Dual boot working great configuring as we speakI hope I have answered some of your questions about this PCIe 2.0 SATA 3 4 port card.I can't review the RAID or DUO on this card as I have no use for them. I using the card as 4 SATA 3 6GB PortsI'm happy with it so far. My SSD are running near 400mbs which is great for these almost 3 year old SSD The Liteonit is actually running better than it did in my Asus G75.I'll revisit this review in a few months if all goes well and sooner if it doesn'tEdit 2015-10-07 Since this review I have upgraded the computer that this card in installed on. Asus Z97 Pro board. this one has plenty of SATA 6 ports So I currently have 2 ports running DVD Writers and 2 ports running eSATA external drives. So after a year of use I have had no failure or other issues. The Documentation was the only issue. I still have no use for RAID set up so I still can not comment on that. I did start this new board on window 8.1Pro Fresh install and then upgraded to win 10 pro. So this card will Work with Windows 7,8.1,10.The two external SATA 3.0 hard drives are used for local back ups I consider that mission critical.

I needed a Port-Multiplier compatible eSATA card for attaching a Mediasonic external RAID enclosure (my model is HFR2-SU3S2.) I found this card and it is better and faster than the Syba SD-SA2PEX-2E card Mediasonic recommended. This card is currently $22 more, but well worth the extra money. It’s a PCI-e x2 lane sized card, which is part of benefit, but see details below, as it needs to be installed in a PCI-e x4, x8 or x16 slot. NOTE: It can get confusing because “Syba” and “IO Crest” and “Best connectivity” brands seem to be the same, with different packaging/branding. (When I ordered my original Syba card directly from the Amazon link Mediasonic provided, the box I received said “Best connectivity” but the product part number was identical. This IO Crest model I now use is the same part # as a Syba brand SI-PEX40063, and seems to be the same card, so you can purchase either brand of that model number. My situation as follows:My system has Asus X79 (Rampage IV Extreme) motherboard, running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit.I have the HFR2-SU3S2 set as RAID-5 with four 3TB drives. My motherboard onboard eSATA could not accommodate hot plugging or using drive after system is in sleep mode, so I needed an external PCI card. I purchased the Syba card Mediasonic recommended but was not impressed with the data transfer speeds I was getting, nor could I remove the HFR2-SU3S2 enclosure while the system was in sleep mode without getting errors on resume.After much research I decided to try this (IO Crest) SI-PEX40063 card. I’ve been very pleased with the results. It’s a SATA III (6G) card with PCI-e 2.0 x2 interface (lane). The x2 means the connector is physically bigger than the more commonly found x1 cards like the Syba SD-SA2PEX-2E, and thus needs to be installed in a PCI-Express x4, x8, or x16 slot. It will NOT fit into a PCI-e 1.0 x1 slot. The advantage of the x2 lane means that it’s double the data bandwidth of an x1 lane. Whether due to the faster x2 interface or the SATA 6G specification, benchmark tests on my HFR2-SU3S2 show my sequential data transfer speed is SIGNIFCANTLY better - 100MB/s read and 81MB/s write faster with the new card! Since I cannot add my CrystalDiskMark benchmark screenshots, sequential speed on this card is 225MB/s read, 208MB/s write (versus 126/127 (read/write) on the Syba SD-SA2PEX-2E card.) 512K speeds are also faster: 47MB/s read and 26MB/s write (versus 38/21 on other Syba card.)Also, hot plugging the drive enclosure into running Windows works, it reliably turns off when the system goes to sleep, and comes back online on resume, with no errors or problems being recognized. (I cannot “safely remove device” within Windows, but if I take it out while the system is in sleep mode, I do not get errors or problems on resume.) I’ve used this card for a month now with no problems.Some additional notes: The SI-PEX40063 card uses a Marvel 88SE9235 chip (Marvel 92xx driver.) On initial install, Windows automatically added the standard Microsoft AHCI 1.0 Serial ATA controller driver, which works perfectly and which I am using. I did try the available Marvel driver(s), but I found them to be unreliable and unnecessary. Rolling Windows back to the original Microsoft driver proved the best solution. I spent an incredible amount of time trying to find a decent PCI e-SATA card for my Mediasonic enclosure, and I hope this posting and information helps others currently in the same position.