IO CREST Dual M.2 B-Key SATA SSD Converter PCI Express 3.0 x1 Expansion Card Heat Sink Jmicron JMB582 Chipset SI-PEX40153

Previously, I had an older PCI SATA RAID card that served my purposes well. I didn't use the hardware (simulated) RAID functionality on in, but rather had simply used the 4 ports available for SATA expansion. Unfortunately, after awhile, the card started throwing errors in Windows when I tried setting up a Windows dynamic drive using the old card. So, I began my search for something to replace it, and came across these! I purchased two of them for my needs (since these are only 2 ports, instead of my old one, which was 4 ports). They came nicely packaged in a small box, complete with a SATA cable as well( nice touch!). I didn't even bother with the instructions. A simple plug-and-play, and I was good to go! The drivers installed on their own, the SATA drives were detected, and I was able to build my RAID-5 dynamic drive in Windows. I now have double the capacity of what I previously had, and couldn't be happier. One thing to note - I now have a 3x2TB RAID-5 dynamic drive on my Windows Server. This works well, and I get decent transfer speeds. However, if I have a power failure, and the system goes down hard, when it's brought back up, the RAID drive is in a bad state, and must be rebuilt. I don't know if that's a fault of the cards, or a fault of using a Windows software RAID setup (I'd guess the latter). But I figured it was worth pointing out. Either way though, I love the card, and I love the compact form factor of it. It fits nicely! (Oh, and as others have said, the cover plate may be slightly out of alignment when you try to put it in your system. Simply unscrew the two screws a bit on the board, adjust the plate, and rescrew them together. No harm done.)

This is a fantastic add on card, particularly for adding SATA III ports to otherwise good motherboards that only have SATA II, or simply have too few ports. My workstation (Win7 64 environment) and gaming system is fairly robust, consisting of: Socket 1366 EVGA X58 SLI LE motherboard (circa 2009) Intel Core i7 970 hexacore CPU 12GB DDR3 EVGA GTX 570 Definitely not a slouch. What it was lacking in, was SATA III ports. I use an SSD on my boot drive, but its speed was being held back by SATA II. Having recently bought a SATA III 128GB OCZ Vertex 4 SSD, I wanted to appreciate the drive's very good performance, without plunking down a couple hundred dollars just for a SATA III motherboard for an outdated socket. Real world performance on the 128GB OCZ Vertex 4 was such that I could reasonably expect to see 450MB/s for sequential read/write speeds, with an optimal SATA 3 controller. Being fully cognizant that I am only spending a miniscule $17 on a budget brand card to add a couple SATA 3 ports, where there previously were none, I bought this with understanding that it would be unlikely for me to see the 450MB/s read/write performance that others were seeing as it were with more robust SATA 3 controllers. So I bought this IoCrest/Syba PCIE card. It delivered. Running several benchmarks with AS SSD, I tested the 128GB Sata III OCZ SSD as it performed with the onboard SATA II, versus this add on card's SATA III. Onboard SATA2- Read/Write average: 266/235 MB/s Add-On budget SATA 3- Read/Write average: 371/364 MB/s Great! Very respectable! This $17 card provided a nearly 50% increase in read/write performance over SATA 2, which exactly fits the bill for what I was looking for. As long as you are not expecting pinnacle performance from this, you can reasonably expect to see a decent speed boost if you are upgrading from SATA 2. There are some installation nuances that one needs to consider when installing this for bootable drives, that I think others who negatively rated this product may have not considered: -Set your BIOS SATA controllers to AHCI mode, not IDE. A lot of people forget to set this, as most motherboards default to IDE. IDE will artificially slow your drives and possibly create conflicts with this card. -The hardware/card should be installed first, without attaching any drives to it. This is so Windows can recognize the hardware and make the appropriate changes to the OS. Once booted into Windows, install the drivers (I went to the Syba website and downloaded the latest, rather than using those on the disk) and restart, insuring that the device is fully recognized. Failure to do this and you are almost guaranteed a blue screen. -Once you ensure that Windows recognizes this, turn off your computer and attach your boot drive to this card. Turn back on go back into your BIOS and make sure you set hard drive boot priority to this drive. Newer motherboards should have the ability to select and detect bootable add on cards. It should appear as "SCSI Add On Card" with your hard drive model listed next to it. Most consumer motherboards (Asus, Gigabyte, EVGA, Foxconn, etc) will support this. !! -If you are using a prebuilt PC, such as from Dell, HP, etc, your BIOS is likely locked down, and this card will probably not work for you if you intend to use it for bootable drives. If you are in this category, you will most likely only be able to use this for secondary non-boot drives. Overall, I'm extremely satisfied with this product and have picked up a couple more of these cards, to increase the number of drives I could attach to various computers. Zero problems to report on 4 wildly different PCs.

I purchased the IOCREST SB-PEX40039 with the Asmedia (ASM1061) SATA controller to add a LG Bluray (WH14NS40) SATA optical drive. My Dell XPS Gen 4 had all four SATA ports used to support two virtual RAID 1 drives that have served me well for several years now. So I needed an additional SATA port and this card offered to add two more SATA ports at an economical price. I did previously purchased a more costly Silverstone TEK PCIE card. But it played havoc with my Dell PC causing it to fail to boot. I quickly returned it since my PC boots fine without it. Thanks Amazon for your much appreciated return policy that keeps me coming back to make more purchases. According to the Dell specification for my PC the PCIE (PCI-Express) x1 port is capable of bidirectional transfer of 500 MB/s. This approximately fits the PCIE 2.0 specification of 250 MB/s (in each direction). So I assumed that the PCIE socket on this PC was a SATA II (300 MB/s) capable socket. For those of you who are planning to purchase this card you should be aware that the approximate transfer rate you will get with this card installed on your PC is primarily dependent on SATA specification of the motherboard and the specific PCIE socket you install it in (x1, x4, x16, etc). That is, if your motherboard only supports SATA I well you can only expect SATA 1 transfer rate and not SATA III with this card installed. That said this card can support SATA III if your motherboard’s PCIE socket supports it. For older PCs your best bet will be installing this card in a PCIE x16 socket for maximum transfer rate and not in an x1 socket if one is available. My PC had no x16 socket available so I was stuck with the x1 socket. I installed this card in my available x1 socket attached the Blu-ray drive and rebooted. The PC booted fine displaying the Asmedia boot information. The only problem was that the PC BIOS complained that I needed to depress the F1 key to continue or F2 to enter the BIOS. I latter discovered that I caused the problem since I disconnected and removed the old PATA optical drive and failed to disabled it in the BIOS. Once I disabled the PATA port the IOCREST card has been working beautifully so far but only as “Gen 1” SATA ports (SATA 1). That’s fine with me since burning Blu-ray disc is a slow process to begin with and a faster SATA transfer rate won’t help much. Yes, I can play Blu-ray movies with the open VLC player that buffers its input. Since my PC is a multi-boot system with Microsoft Windows XP, Windows 7 and Window 8 I was able to test the card in all three Operating Systems (OSs). The card works fine in all three as advertised. The tricky part was installing the driver for this card in each of the three OSs. The included instructions in the README file located on the mini CD disc are helpful but not correct. Apparently, they are in need of updating. For example, in Win7 after rebooting the system recognized the card as a “Standard SATA IO Controller.” Running the Win7 “Setup.exe” file installed the correct driver without incident. For Win8 I followed the instructions located at the Sybausa.com website to manually install the correct driver on the CD disc for my 64 bit Win8 system. For WinXP I cancelled the WinXP search for the driver and ran the WinXP “Setup.exe” on the CD without incident. So in summary the IOCREST card works as advertised on my multi-boot Windows PC albeit as SATA I ports. Installing the driver for the card is straight forward running the appropriate “Setup.exe” file located on the mini-CD or SYBIA website for WinXP and Win7. For Win8 you may need to manually install the approximate driver as per the SYBIA instructions located on their website. Lastly, I can recommend the card for similar Dell PCs as my Dell XPS Gen4 PC. Just make sure you have the lasted BIOS installed and disable in the BIOS any I/O ports you are not using or disconnected. As mentioned in many of the reviews make sure that ACHI is enabled in the BIOS. For my system that meant setting “RAID/ACHI” which in my case it was already set. Hope this helps! Thanks SYBIA I can now get a few more years of use out of my reliable DELL PC. You just need to update your driver installation instructions.

Have you purchased an SSD but are getting very low benchmarks? It is likely that your board is either not SATA 3 capable, or, is being limited by the motherboard chipset itself. This card solves that problem, allowing you to experience close to advertised speed of the drive. This board is PCI Express 2.0 capable and also AHCI compatible. One thing you need to know, although this is a PCI 1x card, you will get much higher speeds if you place this in your PCI 16x slot, which is downwards compatible. Driver install was a snap, the post is very fast and overall this card, and everything attached to it, has performed flawlessly. Here are the details: My board : 790i FTW Ultra Drive: OCZ Vertex 4 SSD Benchmark speeds Connected to onboard AHCI SATA 2 port on my motherboard - Read - 125MB/sec Write - 80MB/sec Connected to IO Crest card in my PCI 1x slot - Read - 160MB/sec Write - 120MB/sec Connected to IO Crest card in my PCI 16x slot - Read - 400MB/sec Write - 425MB/sec The numbers speak for themselves, what a difference this addon card made. The ATTO benchmark results are also vastly improved across all transfer sizes. This card also is faster than the HighPoint Rocket 620x by a pretty large amount, and less expensive. Obviously results on different boards may vary, for a lot of reasons, but this card certainly allowed me to experience the higher speeds of my SSD drive.

Pros: Very easy installation and comes with SATA cables (though I didn't use the ones provided). Works with FreeNAS (FreeBSD 8.2.0). I did not try this with Windows or Linux or any other OS, but if it works on FreeBSD it should work on just about any modern OS. Cons: Only con is the SATA cables that came with it seemed cheap so I used some better ones I had on hand. With cheap cables I found myself having to move ports or reseat the cables every few months in both of my boxes at home. I finally bought some better SATA cables and haven't had any issues since. You may want to use some better cables. I wasn't expecting this to even come with cables so I am not taking away a star. Other Info: I have a FreeNAS box set up. The motherboard only had 4 onboard SATA ports so I needed to add more. I have one PCI-E 3.0 x16 slot and 4 PCI-E 3.0 x1 slots so my options for adding SATA controllers were limited. I already had 3 drives in the server and I took apart some external hard drives I had laying around to add to the server. I stuck the card in, added the drives and powered up and everything worked right out of the gate. Option BIOS screen popped showing it recognized my 1 TB and 2 TB drives I had connected to the SATA card and FreeNAS booted right up and drives appeared in the 'View Disks' section of the web gui. I was hesitant to buy this because I could not find anywhere that this specific chipset is supported on FreeBSD (on which FreeNAS is based) but I did see where it just adds the drives via AHCI so I took the chance and I couldn't be happier.

I think Syba stays in business because their products are cheap enough that they aren't worth the effort to return. I looked for a high rated PCI-E x1 card because that's the only expansion slot available in a work PC. I was not expecting it do deliver SATA 3 speeds but I did expect it to work. This chipset has mixed results in different motherboards but a common result is complete failure. These results are with Windows 7. I don't believe this card has a chance in a Windows 8/8.1 PC from what I've read. I popped it in and booted it with no drives attached. With no drives attached there's no delay booting the PC and it doesn't display it's BIOS message. Windows detected it and installed it's own driver. Rebooted it with a drive attached. Windows failed to boot. It gets as far as Starting Windows and freezes. Detached drive. Rebooted, tried the driver disk supplied. Same failure with drive attached. Searched Syba site and downloaded latest driver. Went into device manager first to check the version I was replacing: 1.1.9.0 1/30/2011. Removed driver, rebooted, installed new driver. Identical to the one on the disc. With all the complaints on the web regarding this card's chipset and compatibility, you might think they'd have updated the driver in 3 1/2 years or the board. Tried a few variations but Windows will not boot with a drive attached. I had tried to use this for the system drive. The Windows logo appears and Starting Windows is displayed and freezes. I had been attaching SSDs to the card (Yes, I know they wouldn't be as fast as an onboard SATA 3) and plugged in a standard hard drive. Windows still will not boot. All drives worked before and do again with this thing out of the system. I imagine if you are considering this card, it's because you have the same slot limitations I had and your PC is getting a little long in the tooth. If you're still considering it, I would highly suggest googling your motherboard and the ASM1061 chipset this uses. The system this went in is an older Dell XPS 7100 The last Syba card I bought was a USB 3 card and the only devices it would accept were keyboard and mouse. Your time is worth more than this card.

I am not a computer expert by any stretch. I purchased the IO Crest 2 Port SATA III PCI-Express x1 Card for my Dell Vostro 270S (small footprint) .(Windows 7 professional) 1/28/2013 I wanted to add an SSD to the Vostro 270s desktop but it only has 2 SATA ports which are already in use by HD and DVD. I want the SSD for running software that is hard drive dependent and slow. I am not replacing hd, and am not using SSD as boot disk. I received the IO Crest 2 Port SATA III PCI-Express x1 Card and the first issue was the Vostro 270S is a low profile , so I had to remove the bracket (2 screws) and just insert the card with no support. The Vostro 270s only has one pci-express x1 expansion slot,Power off I inserted the PCI card. Then started the desktop with internet connection available , Windows said the card was installed. Power off With power off, I then attached the SATA cable to the SSD and then to PCI card ( I used top plug on PCI card) and attached power cable to SSD and started the desktop. Everything booted fine, but no new drive showed on windows explorer. I freaked out for about an hour and then started reading amazon reviews and solved my amateur problem. Go to disk management, (Control Panel, clicking System and Maintenance, clicking Administrative Tools, and then double-clicking Computer Management. If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation. In the Navigation pane, under Storage, click Disk Management. The new SSD shows up (for me as DISK 1, hd is DISK 0), you then click the ssd disk 1 and create a volume, and then format. It worked for me and now I am a happy camper. Side note on SSD for Dell Vostro 270S I installed a Kingston SSDNOW 300 1220GB. The Dell Vostro 270S is problematic , it has no extra SATA slots, no extra power outlets, and one expansion slot, but I could not find a bracket for the low profile slot. . I put the SSD unattached in a front left area , with the some steel brackets to keep it from sloshing around. I purchase a splitter (y) cable for the power and used the power going to the DVD, and a SATA cable (12 inches) to run from the PCI card to the front where the SSD was sitting..

I bought this to add on to my current Dell Studio XPS 9100 which doesn't have SATA 3 to support my new Samsung EVO SSD 250GB (boot drive). This device works right out of the box without any update from the CD, took me about 10 minutes to install it. You will get 4 port of Sata 3 no eSata but that's okay with me. It comes with 2 and they are both SATA 3 capable but I opted to use real Sata 3 cables. Didn’t setup my optical drives with this device but I don't think I need to at this time. Thanks for other reviews to help me make up my mind to purchase this device. For what I need, this card is an excellent purchase for the price/performance. One more thing, Amazon is great and always has been for me as for their services and products, kudos to Amazon. I hope this review would help you. This is my current system setup: Main Board: Dell 05DN3X Chipset: Intel X58 Processor: Intel Core i7 960 @3200 MHz (max: 3458) - 4 Core - Socket 1366 LGA Physical Memory: 12288 MB (6 x 2048 DDR3-SDRAM) Video Card: AMD Radeon HD 6600 Series (will be replaced soon) SSD: Samsung 840 EVO 250 GB ATA Device (Sata 6 GB/s) HDD: Seagate ST32000641AS ATA Device (2000 GB - Sata 6 GB/s - 7200 rpm) DVD-Rom Drive: HL-DT-ST DVDRWBD CH20N DVD-Rom Drive: HL-DT-ST BD-RE BH10LS30 Network Card: Realtek Semiconductor RTL8168/8111 PCIe Gigabit Ethernet Adapter Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium Home Edition Media Center 6.01.7601 Service Pack 1 (64-bit) Disc Controller 1: Intel 82801J (ICH10) 6 port Sata I/O controller 1 CC-AHCI (Dell) - Sata 2 - 3 GB/s - Gen 2 Disc Controller 2: Marvell Peripheral type Sata (this device - SI-PEX40064) - Sata 3 - 6 GB/s - Gen 3 - No RAID or eSata - X1 port Have a great day! :)