The IO Crest 2 Port SATA III 6Gbps PCI-Express x1 Card is the easiest way to update any computer with SATA ports. Once installed¸ this host card will add SATA ports with two independent channels. This allows support of two SATA devices at speeds of up to 6Gb/s whether it is a SATA hard drive or SATA device. The IO Crest 2 Port SATA III 6Gbps PCI-Express x1 Card is the easiest way to update any computer system.
$ 16.22
Satisfied customer with a quality product,
Let me give a little background. I originally bought a Crucial M4 64GB SSD drive so I could give my new gaming rig the extra push that I always wanted. After installing the SSD to my 1 year old ASUS motherboard, I noticed that my speeds weren’t quite what I was fully expecting, even after tweaking and Q&A’ing the support forums. It was narrowed down to my motherboard which contains a simple AMD 880G chipset with SATAII connections. While this is perfectly fine with ordinary hard drive, it becomes a bottleneck for SSD’s.
That scenario led me to this product. I sought for a way to gain SATAIII connections without replacing my current motherboard. This product does just that. I made sure I had an empty PCIe x1 card slot open and checked the specs and reviews. Shipping and packaging was good as always. Installation was easy and I downloaded the latest AHCI drivers from the manufacturers website (http://www.sybausa.com/resource/SY-PEX40039/SY-PEX40039.ZIP). Installing an ordinary hard drive to this is not going to give any performance increase, but it is definitely worth the investment here. I can recommend this for anyone with SSD’s with a slow chipset (mainly AMD’s). As evidence below, I recorded a 35{b81fbfd19e1fca5890798868c0714c408bbd5ec471654b6f9630c0fffa6e7eb3} increase in performance via total score. Easily worth a $20 investment.
For those interested, this PCIe performs on par with the Marvell controller.
Results of AS-SSD benchmark testing:
Using SATAII 880G chipset slot:
Seq:
Read 255 MB/s
Write 109 MB/s
4K:
Read 19 MB/s
Write 42 MB/s
4K-64Thrd:
Read 150 MB/s
Write 89 MB/s
Acc time:
Read .132 ms
Write .259 ms
Score:
Read 196
Write 143
Total score: 438
Using Syba SATAIII slot:
Seq:
Read 366 MB/s
Write 110 MB/s
4K
Read 23 MB/s
Write 72 MB/s
4K-64Thrd
Read 216 MB/s
Write 97 MB/s
Acc Time
Read .102 ms
Write .257
Score
Read 276
Write 181
Total
594
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|It does the job,
Using this card with a single SATA-III SSD, the card allows me to get about 150MBps greater transfer rate than when I use my motherboard’s SATA-II ports, so it does more or less what I wanted it to. Unfortunately, my SSD is still capable of maxing out the theoretical limit of a PCI-E x1 port (500 MBps) and this card falls about 100MBps short of that. It’s a good price, however, considering PCI-E x4 cards of this nature are much more expensive.
For the price, I would still recommend this card if your aim is to increase the benefit of an SSD over stock SATA-II ports. It’s probably pretty useful for adding a couple SATA-III HDDs to a striped partition as well.
NOTE: You will not be able to use your motherboard’s built in RAID controller when this card is installed in your computer.
Update from months later: I’m removing a star due to the crappy SATA connections. Every month at least 2 or 3 times I have to move the cable from one of the ports to the other. SATA connections are notoriously weak but the card could have employed clips.
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|Not for amatuers.,
I bought two SATAIII (6Gb/s) PCIe adapter cards.
The SY-PEX40032 has a Marvel Chipset.
The SY-PEX40039 has an Asmedia Chipset.
My thought being that if one worked and the other didn’t, then I would return one, and order another of the one that did. Let’s face it, none of these cards (Even those costing over $100.00) have gotten very many good reviews. Surprise, surprise, I got both of them to work.
My situation: My step-son built a power system for me, and I am modifying for my use which will include quite a few hard drives. I’m an old-fart expert starting with vacuum tube computers in 1961. I’ve had my own PCs, Aplle IIc, Mac, TRS80, very 1st IBM PC. After DOS, I started with Windows 1.0. I have supported hundreds of PCs. My step-son works for a PC mfg company, and builds PCs for fun. You will understand the relevance of this in a little.
My Mobo, an ASRock Z68 Prof Gen 3 did not have enough SATA ports for my needs/wants. There were several ways that I could go, but I needed an increase of 3-4 internal ports. 2 of the MoBo’s SATA ports are dedicated to external use. I could not find a SATA III card with 4 ports. There are all sorts of war stories about conficting chipsets, bad drivers, BIOSes, etc.
Why SATA III? The Mobo may support the full bandwidth of SATA II (3Gb/s) & SATA III (6Gb/s), but PCI Express slots do not. If the slots aren’t PCIe 2.0 and the chipset on the card aren’t able to support PCIe 2.0, then the max bandwidth is 2.5 Gb/s. If the card supports, and the slots are PCIe 2.0, then the max bandwidth is 5.0 Gb/s. That is why some report that their SATA II (3Gb/s) drives seem faster on a SATA III card than a SATA II card. I could not find a suitable SATA II card that supported PCIe 2.0. The other thing is that SATA III cards are more likely to support important things like NCQ, Port Multiplier FIS switching, etc. Benchmarks don’t show a lot of benefits to SATA III over SATA II as far as traditional Hard Drives are concerned. SSD though is a different matter. Plus, as I have mentioned previously, if the connection is via PCIe, it can make a diffrence.
Now to my order: Both cards came packaged as an I/Ocrest card instead of the Syba card as ordered. They did show the model numbers as SY-PEX40032 and SY-PEX40039, and both had mini-CDs that had several drivers on each.
Installation… Whew! This is where not understanding some of the ins and outs of installing PCIe cards can be a problem. For each card installation, I got several Black Screens, auto reinstallation of drivers for every device attached, etc.
On the 40032 card, I used Device Manager (One of my users used to call it Device Mangler) to install the driver from a hard disk copy of the mini-CD. (This could be an issue for slot fed CD readers).
On the 40039 card, best I can tell, W7 automatically installed an Asmedia driver that was already on the computer. My Mobo has both Marvel & Asmedia chipsets for SATA
Basically, I just kept trying many things until I got both cards to work. This includes recovering from black screens by changing slots, and after all the junk settled down, reinstalling back to where I wanted it. Be sure you have good backups before starting this venture. The bottom line is that if you are an amatuer, you need to enlist someone with experience to install either card.
Update:1/21/2012– I tested this card with no problems. Then when I really needed it, it did not come through. Everything looks fine through bootup, etc. Then the four colors of Microsoft start to spin to join together when it stops abruptly. Probably need to update the driver. I just reconnected the HDDs to which it was connected to a SATA II port, and no more problems. Any card will take some time during the bootup process, so I will remove the card until I really need it again, and want to spend time trying to resolve the issue. I basically have all the internal drives running that I need currently. I can also attach several external drives if & when I need. Still not for amatuers, unless you want the experience.
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