Top positive review
14 people found this helpful
Make sure to set AHCI mode in BIOS
By Michael M. on Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2012
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drive's very good performance, without plunking down a couple hundred dollars just for a SATA III motherboard for an outdated socket.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.
Top critical review
3 people found this helpful
Very disappointed.
By Natalie E. G. H. on Reviewed in the United States on December 18, 2022
1. There is no manual. 2. I have no idea if it supports optical drives. It is not supporting mine. 3. The cables sent with the drive are trash. I thought I had somehow lost 2 drives because they would not show up. I have a total of twenty drives (counting the optical drives) directly connected. That is part of why I bought the io controller. 4. There is no customer service apparently in the USA. The only telephone number for IO Crest is in Hong Kong. I do not have international service on my telephone. 5. The website is in Chinese (I do not mind as we do all our websites in English but most offer additional languages. This one does not). I do not read Chinese of any flavor. 6. The website does not list the card I purchased from then less than 1 week ago. I found the page with IO controllers. They provide the model number in Roman letters, my model is not present. I had hoped to find the model and try tracing to a manual. 7. The card on boot up did something to my computer, I do not know what. It must have changed the BIOS on the motherboard somehow. I was going to go back to my old IO card until I could get new cables but MY COMPUTER WILL NOT EVEN POWER ON WITHOUT THE CARD INSTALLED. I have to leave it installed to do anything. The computer powers on fine with the card installed. I checked if several times. Card in, powers on, remove card nothing (at first I actually thought the motherboard or CPU had failed when I tried switching back and poof nothing). Put back in the card, powers on. Remove nothing. I did this test 3 times. My computer now requires this card. That is a MAJOR PROBLEM. I am purchasing new cables, hopefully they will fix some of the problems. If they do I can connect the optical drives from my motherboard SATA ports. I might possibly raise the rating if the new cables I am ordering work. I really do want this card, heck I was considering purchasing a second one. The motherboard problem is not insignificant to me. The lack of support for optical drives is not insignificant. I now doubt I will be making that second purchase for my main disk tower (home built NAS). I admit my hardware is older (ASRock Z87 Extreme 4 with Intel I7-4770K) but modifying the BIOS especially without warnings to the customer prior, hopefully prior to purchase, is simply not acceptable. Edit Added: I have now purchased a new set of cables for one of the 3 SlimSAS connection points (They are expensive so I only bought 1 set to test first). The original cables gave me 1 connected drive on each of the cables for a total of 3 SATA drives instead of 24. The new cables increased the number of connected SATA drives by 2 to 3 for that SlimSAS connection. As I was connecting up 8 drives, I would have expected 7 more connections. The fact that I got 2 more connections suggests the card has a problem. I would not be returning it had the results not changed as it may have been incompatible with other hardware. With no manuals or other information, and the listing stating it was compatible with Windows 7, 8, 10, 11, I could only assume it would work but it was a guess. Now I am sure it is due to a problem with either that specific board or that line. I am returning the board for a full refund and have ordered a 16 SATA 3 connection I/O card. I worked in a main frame systems shop and saw similar cards (I do not know the manufacture) is use all the time. I had hoped to avoid the clutter all the SATA cables would cause. I will accept the clutter now.
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