Ableconn PEX-SA134 4-Port eSATA III 6Gbps PCI Express Four Lanes Host Adapter Card - AHCI Port-Multiplier PCIe 2.0 x4 Controller Card

The PXA-130SA saved me days of work migrating from CentOS-6-KVM to CentOS-7-KVM. Previously the Orico drive towers (without RAID) were connected by USB-3,0 Super Speed and were passed through to the virtualized NAS via PCIe address. CentOS-7-KVM passed the USB device through but not the ports of the JBOD (LVM + RAID). Simple drives worked, but not the drives of the JBOD storage pools. The BIOS SuperMicro X11SAE-F recognized the drives, enumerated the drive models, made the drives available for the hotswap/permanent BIOS menu and for the boot drive menu. I now have 16 fully BIOS integrated AHCI + NCQ SATA III drives that pass through to my virtual NAS's. Both the CentOS-6-KVM and CentOS-7-KVM systems now have their 17, full function, RAID arrays. The Supermicro typically has about 2 dozen SPICE (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments - think RDP on steroids) virtual desktops and a half dozen workload servers. Thank you, Ablecom for making this device available at a reasonable price and no I am not a salesman.After 2 months of operation I have not had a single JBOD (RAID + LVM) resynch. The almost triple throughput is a nice bonus. The upstart is I am migrating my VM "backup-nas" to use a second PEX-SA130 eSATA adapter.I believe that 10 drives for the 2 port is an actual limitation because it lists drives frem "1" to "A". I have 4 drives per drive tower and 4 towers.---Ater 2 days in my production environment, I am blown away by the increase in the vNAS throughput. At least 4x faster than the USB-3.0 super-speed configuration. I didn't benchmark the USB configuration so this is a purely subjective opinion. The cause maybe because the the RAID-1 JBOD has the two LVM (storage pools in M$ terms) on different PCIe lanes or the AHCI command enhancements or both. in any case OMG and WOW.---After 2 months of operation, I have experienced no JBOD resynchs, which used to happen about every other week. I am purchasing another PEX-SA130 to migrate another pair of exteral drive towers from USB to eSATA used by my VM "backup-nas". This will provide my system with 24 AHCI drive bays. I never thought I could actually use that much storage; but then again, I never thought I would ever need 64 GB of memory.

EDIT/UPDATE:I'm giving this more stars on account of the excellent customer service of Ableconn. They went out of their way to troubleshoot this card with me.Unfortunately, it still didn't work with my old system so I can't give an objective review of the device performance.Long and short, if your PC has PCI-E 2.0 x2 lane or greater, it may be new enough to boot from this card. Backwards compatibility is touch-and-go.Given the performance of its options ROM, it seems to be a stable card.Original review:To give this card the benefit of the doubt, it may work on a PCI-e 2.0 system or greater, with Windows (or other OS) being installed *fresh*, just after the card's installation.I purchased this card to get as close to SSD speeds as I could with my old ASUS P5N-32 e sli. (PCI-e 1.0 x1 = ~256MBs >> PCI-e 1. 0 x2 ~512MBs).After going through driver installation (windows default as per manufacturer's sparse instructions) with my OS disk plugged in my motherboard's SATA, I swapped the drive to the cards primary port and it just hung at the cards POST screen.Granted, the operating system was not installed in AHCI, but most likely IDE.However, a close relative of this chipset, the ASM1061, had no issues recognizing this.Amazon Customer Service was understanding.

I just installed this card a couple of days ago and it has exceeded my expectations. The chipset Marvell 9230 is recognized by Win 10, Linux, and Mac10.14. I was able to raid 2 240GB SSD and they are seen by all the OS. The transfer rate is about 750MB in a PCIx2 slot and I am only using 2 drives. Be aware that if you use a PCIx1 slot or have all 4 ports used the speed will drop to about the same as good a single ssd. The website has all the information, utilities, and drivers for the OSs above mentioned. The software interface is very simple and I was able to setup the drives fairly quick. I had no errors whatsoever while transferring large files. I am very pleased with the performance and for the price it is very flexible as it can be seen by all OS.

Not ready for prime time. BIOS is not accessible at boot. The settings in the Windows raid controller utility are very meager. You can only setup a new RAID but I found no way to delete an existing "broken" one. Only had 1 successful boot through the device before it became a non-bootable device. After my first mirror through the software failed, I can no longer boot any HDD or SSD through the card. Drives will boot through the onboard ports (as they did before) and I can still see the card and devices attached to it through the Windows utility but they are not recognized at boot. Also the utility indicates that the raid is broken (when the drives are attached) but that's it. You can't reset, delete or clear any settings. It almost appears that its a one shot raid controller with no way to clear previous settings.Even if I were to somehow get this working, I have no confidence in it as a reliable raid for mirroring. Back it goes.