Cheap price on Syba SD SATA 1E1I PCI SATA 1 Port and e SATA 1 Port Card with SIL3512 Chipset order it now
Band : Syba
Model : SD SATA 1E1I
Product Features :
- PCI SATA/eSATA Raid Controller Card
>> Works Great
Working great on my old Pentium 4 Media Center PC very easy to install Love it
>> Good basic PCI SATA/eSATA adapter for the price works with Linux
I bought this adapter after having some trouble with a quad port Rosewill card I needed an eSATA adapter for use with a Startech Dual eSATA Dock SATADOCK22UE This is in a c 2003 IBM NetVista desktop with no native SATA ports that is now being used as a SOHO server running stock Debian 5 0 Lenny After the Rosewill card had PCI bus conflicts that were not resolvable with BIOS changes I was a little worried about spending more money on a high end card for this old machine The SiI 3512 chip appeared to have a reasonable reputation for Linux support and for less than twenty bucks this Syba SD SATA 1E1I card seemed like a cheap bet After the first one installed well I bought a second adapter to connect to the second port on the external dock There were no problems putting two of these cards in this machine Due to my desire to keep OS and data separate on this server I am continuing to boot off of a PATA drive connected to the mainboard and have not tested whether these cards handle boot drives well
As far as hotswapping when using the eSATA dock my method has been to do the actual drive insertions and removals with the dock port powered off Since the Startech dock has physical power switches I have not tempted fate by testing true hotswap with live ports I also manually spin the drives down i e sdparm C stop /dev/whatever before power off to avoid unnecessary emergency head retracts In all cases the stock Lenny kernel has detected everything correctly and added and removed the device files exactly as expected on power up and power down
These cards have performed flawlessly with both internal and external SATA connections I replaced the main internal PATA data drive with a 1TB WD Caviar Black and I ve been running backups to and between various SATA drives in the dock After at least 10 TB aggregate r/w through the cards I ve had no problems at all I am quite wary whenever doing bulk data transfers on consumer grade hardware and all of these transfers have been md5sum verified afterwards So I m fairly confident in the above statement That said it s always a good idea to treat all hardware with suspicion when moving around large amounts of data
As far as performance goes these cards are SATA Rev 1 0 don t support NCQ and as standard PCI cards are limited in overall performance They appear to also be limited to UDMA/100 but this could be a Linux driver thing But for the price they do fine In my setup with this fairly old machine I can only get about 110MiB/s aggregate no matter what combination of source/dest I m using On reads the WD CB 1TB drives seem to max out around 95MiB/s with my config slighly below their rated performance However this represents about 2x performance gain over the built in controllers and PATA drives I was using previously and about 3 6x better than external USB drives so I m not complaining at all For my purposes reliability always trumps speed at a given price
These cards have definitely breathed new life into this old computer
>> Great price Easy install
I purchased this card because of it s low price I have an aging machine with Windows XP I bought this card so that I could add storage with a couple of the larger SATA drives I was worried that I may have some installation issues because I didn t know the brand and the price was so much less than the competition Happily the installation could not have been easier The card has internal and external ports and I m using both As of this writing I ve been using it for about a month without any problems
