Syba SI-PEX40064 SATA III 4 Port PCI-e x1 Controller Card with Low Profile Brackets Green

This card is well worth the money (£28.86 Aug 2014). My read speed went from 380 MB/s to an incredible 528 MB/s, despite the SSD only having a maximum manufacturers rating of 450 MB/s.Here are my specs:Kingston 240GB SSDGigabyte GA-X58A-UD5 (Rev 1.0) motherboard having PCIe 2.0 x16 slots and adequate motherboard bus speedIntel I7-920 processorWindows 7 Pro 64 bit installed using AHCI mode (not IDE or RAID)Motherboard Bios switched to AHCI mode and to boot from SSD on cardTRIM command enabledBenchmark software used was ATTOThe install went as follows:W7 originally installed using AHCI mode, and BIOS also set to AHCI mode.Backed up SSD including registry.Set System Restore point.Installed card on motherboard without connecting to SSD, then booted.New hardware recognised by W7 and default driver automatically installed.Shut system down.Rebooted in order to install Marvell 92xx driver from disk, but W7 said the default driver was fine, so left it alone.Shut system down.Connected SSD to card using ordinary SATA cable.Rebooted, during which the boot order was amended to use SSD/card first.W7 booted ok.Performed ATTO benchmark test, got amazing 528 MB/s read speed.The newer Marvell 92xx (88SE9235) chip on the card is x2 (ie uses 2 lanes), so has a theoretical aggregated maximum speed of 1000 MB/s, unlike the older Marvell 91xx chip/cards which are x1 (1 lane only). The latter only have a maximum speed of 500 MB/s and are therefore not full SATA III (= 6 Gb/s= 750 MB/s). The four SATA ports on the card also mean expansion/use of 3 additional SSDs/HDDs at higher speeds (but shared bandwidth).I think this card would probably improve speed on most desktops' hardware combinations, but having the right combination of SSD/motherboard/Windows/BIOS/software settings will make the fullest use of its capabilities.Update 25 Aug 2014:Just had a 2nd card installed (price now increased to £29.04, Aug 2014), desktop specs were as above except motherboard and processor:Sapphire X58 Pure Black motherboard having PCIe 2.0 x16 slots and adequate motherboard bus speedIntel Xeon L5640 Westmere Six Core ProcessorATTO benchmark read speed this time was 534 MB/s.One of the card ports did not appear to be working properly: on booting I got a black screen and a weird "Windows is loading files...." footer message, so immediately shut down, changed the card port connection and then booted ok.The driver on the disk was the same version as the Windows 7 one. Marvell doesn't have a driver download available on their website - bad show, guys. I downloaded the Syba and the Iocrest drivers, the Iocrest one was the latest version (Oct 2013) so updated to that, still got 534 MB/s. The card boot message still says 5.0Gb/s (=625 MB/s) rather than 6.0Gb/s (=750 MB/s), have to say not 100% happy about that.Overall, installing such a card is worth the money provided you have the right hardware. I would check other makes' prices as well in case you can get better value for money in terms of quality/robustness/functionality/drivers/Amazon fiddling with the price.

Bought this to equip my Gigabyte MA785GMT motherboard with SATA III ports to maximise transfer speeds with a Samsung 840 SSD. Fortunately the mobo has one PCI Express 2 slot which is necessary to get the most from this card. Using the ATTO disc benchmark for transfers of 1024KB to 8192KB, the mobo SATA II ports (AHCI) achieved 280MB/sec (Read) and 249MB/sec (Write). With the Syba card installed, transfer rates using SATA III ports (AHCI) improved to 407MB/sec (Read) and 260MB/sec (Write). Read transfers should improve to ~500MB/sec on a new mobo with integrated SATA III ports but write transfer speed is already at the limit of the Samsung 840 SSD.Using Samsung Magician software, the SATA II port (AHCI) gave Seq Read, Seq Write, Random Read, Random Write figures of 263 MB/sec, 252MB/sec, 33443 IOPS, 30706 IOPS. Using SATA III (AHCI) ports on the Syba card gave improved transfer speeds of 394 MB/sec, 257 MB/sec, 52727 IOPS, 43910 IOPS. Cannot agree with some other reviews that this card is no better than the SATA II ports on older motherboards. They may have been using the card in a type 1 PCI express slot, or they had not set their BIOS correctly for AHCI mode transfers. The setup is stable and gives consistent transfer speeds each time the tests are run. With a properly installed Syba card, the Samsung 840 SSD should achieve a maximum 7.9 score on the Windows 7 performance index.Some reviewers have experienced difficulty with the physical installation of this card. By loosening the screws and adjusting the card angle without bending, one can achieve a proper fit with the connections fully home in the slot.

This does the trick perfectly well. I was limited to PCIe x1 for my NAS, and the particular chipset used on this card is highly recommended for TrueNAS.Can confirm, it picked it right up and all drives are still working perfectly, six months on.It's a bit expensive for what it is, but the majority of these on Amazon have an inferior chipset, and don't use PCIe 1x (usually 2x or 4x - even though they're not necessarily faster due to the SATA bottleneck).

I previously used a SiL card from Leaf.de (who I think are no longer in business), but killed it with a firmware upgrade.I needed to provide 8 eSata ports for my media server, to connect to 4-bay external enclosures (Startech and IcyBox, all from Amazon). One constraint is that the motherboard only has single lane PCIe slots, and I could not find any suitable cards with 4 eSata ports. However I had a 4-eSata to Sata backplate from the Leaf card, so by using that and a pair of these Syba cards I now have the 6 eSata ports I needed.Installation was straightforward, using the latest Marvell drivers. It took a couple of reboots before all drives were reliably recognised, but now everything runs completely stable. The drives power down and up with the system. I am using Windows 7 Pro x64, on an MSI E-350D motherboard.I haven't done any real performance testing, but reliably see 100MB/s transfers. With only single lane support I don't expect incredible performance with multiple concurrent drive access, but these cards more than meet the needs of my media server.I am also using, and can heartily recommend, StableBit Drivepool and Scanner. These cards properly pass the SMART data.If you need port-multiplier eSata, and only have single lane slots available, then these are the cards to go for. There is also a similar card with all 4 ports internal, and 2 lane versions of both.