PCIE 3.0 to 4-Ports 6Gbps SATA III Expansion Card for Desktop PCs, Plug and Play on Windows OS, MAC OS, Linux, ASMedia ASM1064 None-Raid PCIE 3.0 SATA III Host Controller (FS-S4-Pro V2)

This card works exactly as it should, without any fuss (far less problematic than the Marvell based cards I've used). However there are a few things to know (this is for the x1, 4 port card):If you are using this to add SATA III 6Gbs ports to an older system, such as one based on x58 or x79, to maximize performance, you will need to use a PCI-E slot with channels provisioned from the primary IO-Hub (x58) or CPU PCI-E IO (x79/Sandybridge and later) and not from the ICH or PCH. This is because ICH or PCH provisioned channels generally lag a generation behind, and are therefore slower.You'll most likely need to use an x16 slot that would normally be used for a GPU (in the case of x58 or x79, there are generally two full x16 slots that are provisioned either from the primary IO-Hub or the CPU integrated IO controller). For this card to provide SATA III's maximum sustained 6 Gb/s (585MB/s), it must be plugged into a PCI-E 3.0 capable slot running at 8 GT/s.On an x58 (or similar vintage board) your maximum performance will be capped by the PCI-E 2.0 5 GT/s, though this will still significantly exceed the ICH10's SATA II ports (410MB/s sustained transfer versus 250MB/s), but you must use a PCI-E slot provisioned directly off the x58 IO-Hub, not the ICH. Generally, all the X1 and X4 slots on x58 boards are PCI-E 1.0, provisioned off the ICH, which will result in this card providing performance significantly below that of the SATA II ports provided by the ICH10 southbridge.On later chipsets, the same basic rules apply (until you get to current gen chipsets, like AMD x570, where PCH and CPU IO-hub PCI-E lanes are all 4.0). If using, for example, an x79 board, the PCH provided PCI-E slots/lanes are 2.0, which will result in this card underperforming compared to the on-board SATA III ports. Again, to maximize performance, you'll need to make sure you plug the card into a PCI-E slot that supports PCI-E 3.0.There are comments that this card doesn't perform well, but this is mainly due to misunderstandings about what PCI-E link type and speed the card is able to run at on a given board and slot. On boards that support PCI-E 3.0, this card can, and does, provide full SATA III 6Gb/s throughput. You can use a tool like HWiNFO to verify if you have the card plugged into the most capable available PCI-E slot (along with simple benchmarking tools like CrystalDiskMark to verify throughput).A final note: for those using a very old chipset, such as x58, you may want to consider the 6 port, PCI-E x2 (physically x4) version of this card, as 2 PCI-E 2.0 lanes should provide full SATA III 6Gb/s throughput.

Although the card says that it isn't a raid card, it means it's not a card with hardware raid - You can definitely use this for software raid.I did a first experiment on Windows 10 using storage spaces and disk manager to create a RAID 10 array using 6x 6tb hdds. Initially I had issues with transfers dropping down to 0MB/s and eventually windows would freeze up completely and/ or the transfer would fail.I dropped the disk count down to one mirrored pair (so two hdds) in storage spaces and had a successful transfer, but I bought this to run all 6 ports into an array - not just two.I finally achieved success by recreating the 6 disk raid 10 array and turning off write caching for all drives in the array through device manager.Something about this expansion card and windows disk write caching doesn't play well when dealing with 6 disks at once. After all of this, a 4TB transfer from a usb3.0 external hdd to the raid array took around 7 hours with a transfer rate of around 160MB/s and a full data verification step by using a program called FastCopy (it's a free program, google "fastcopy jp"). There are other copying utilities that will do this as well.I did reach out to the seller on amazon as a result of my initial issues, and they were fast to reply - although by that time I had already found a solution.At the end of all of this, you're probably better off running some sort of *nix distro and using mdadm to set up the array, but it was a fun challenge getting everything working on Windows.Edit 7/7/2023:Alright, so maybe you don't want to use this with all the disks being slammed at one time by an mdam resync. I had issues with windows storage spaces still dropping transfer speeds and eventually failing writes on some disks, while smart tests were coming out OK on each individual disk. I went over to linux to do this with mdadm and didn't make it through a raid 10 setup before one of the disks dropped (resync speeds were going to take 111 days to build the raid 10 array before it dropped). I redid this as 3x raid 1 pairs instead and it worked. It's a perfectly functional sata expansion card if you're not abusing it like I am, so don't let this review worry you, just beware before trying to use this as something to write to 6 disks at once.The motherboard could be an influence, as well as the disks, as I'm not doing this with enterprise level hardware, but in general the card works, just doesn't like being pushed beyond its limits. The vendor doesn't recommend this for software raid, but I tried anyway. Oh well, 3x 6TB raid 1's will get the job done for my needs (part of a 3,2,1 backup with mdisc as cold storage for the important stuff)