eSata / Sata / IDE PCI RAID Controller Card VIA VT6421A Chip Set

This controller card works beautifully on a lot of Sata devices, I have since used it for a hard drive, and 2 DVD drives and both were recognized perfectly on Windows XP SP2. Very cheap yet good quality. Recommend definitely especially for older pc's lacking Sata ports. Buy it.

I have this card installed on an E-machine running XP for the past week, as a RAID-1 mirror configuration. It is controlling two W.D. 640GB SATA drives and has eased my mind about loosing important data! with this inexpensive investment (one raid card, cables, power adapter and two sata drives) I can back up my three machines and also store my CCTV video. set up was easy, if you buy OEM drives make sure you have the necessary hard drive jumpers to slow down the hard drives (1.5gb transfer rate instead of the 3gb they run at) western digital has literature to show the jumper settings. I had the jumpers and i bought everything else hear at Amazon. i shopped around and I found the parts at amozon were the best price and value other sites were crooked!

This PCI card provides an upgrade path for older PC's without SATA support. It allows you to configure the SATA ports for internal or external use (with limits). Works fine under Windows control, but no onboard BIOS so the usefulness at boot time is more limited. Although I had no need for an extra IDE connection, the board also includes one IDE socket.

Bought this card specifically for doing system backups to an external hard drive. I can't attest to how well the internal SATA or IDE ports work. Installation went OK, Win7 correctly identified it and automatically downloaded drivers for it from Windows update. So I thought "Hey great, no need to fool with the mini CD driver disk labeled SUTUP SOFTWARE (sic)". I was averaging about 25-30 Mb per second transfers on the external hard drive via USB 2.0, and expected to multiply that by at least 2-3 times. But sadly, this card's eSATA port would jump off the starting block at about 75 Mb per second, then very quickly slow down to 50, then 25 then 10 and within 30 seconds transfer rates were down to 2-3 Mb per second. I benchmarked the drive using this card's eSATA port with no less than 6 different hard drive benchmark utilities, and every single one of them timed out (program not responding), due to bottlenecked inability to access and test the drive. I thought maybe the Win7 obtained driver was a possible culprit so I used the SUTUP SOFTWARE (sic) mini CD and it had NO DRIVERS for OS newer than XP on it, and all it did was install a startup RAID Tool that I didn't want or need and had trouble getting rid of (wouldn't uninstall through Control Panel - had to do it the brute force way). Then I searched the web and found a Vista driver for it that I also tried - it had a newer date by one month than the Win7 driver, but it was much worse - the whole OS bogged down with it in use and it took almost FIVE MINUTES for the external hard drive to even be recognized. I re-installed the original Win7 drivers and did one last eval on it. No dice. Ten minutes after commanding a 4 Gb file to be copied to the external drive, less than 2 Gb was transferred and the transfer rate was down to 2 Mb per second. What was I thinking expecting more from a $17 card? Didn't work for me.

What I recieved was not what was in the picture. The drivers are useless. Windows 7 cant even find one online for it. This looks like far from a quality product. Im going to get it working eventually. but it should not be this hard. come on. This doesnt say much about the workmanship of the product. I imageine it would work fantastic if i put it in my nix workstation. Its just a pain with windows. I would recommend if you want an easy solution as a windows user to find another product.

SATA card works in XEON XP system - after boot - I was hoping it would work off BIOS so I could Ghost system to SATA instead of problematic IDE. It works well after boot using a driver.

Great little SATA/e-SATA card. I just plugged into the PCI slot on my old XP system and it works. Just a note: As was mentioned in other posts, only two ports work at a time; either the two internal SATA ports, or one SATA and one e-SATA. Still, a good little card for the price.

I purchased this item because I needed an IDE controller and most (if not all) current motherboards lack them. It is now allowing me to access 2 IDE drives off the same cable, without the slightest hiccup (yet). I did have some momentary anxiety when the card shown on the box cover looked nothing like what I ordered, and the specs did not even mention the IDE controller. So that was weird. My board is an MSI Z77A-G41, running XP Pro.