StarTech.com 2 Port PCI Express SATA 6 Gbps eSATA Controller Card - Dual Port PCIe SATA III Card - 2 Int/2 Ext - SATA III 6Gbps (PEXESAT322I)

Superb card. Plug in and away you go. 8x port multiplyer (JBOD) on eSata ext ports. Fast 6gbs transfer speeds. No dropouts or disconnects. Now the bad news - DOES NOT WORK (YET) ON WINDOWS 10 1809.17763.379. If you are still on revision 316 or lower including builds 1803 it works fine. The fault appeared to be introduced in 1809.17763.348 and Startech support are aware and hopefully working on a fix. Microsoft, as per usual will take a bit longer as getting the required info to the right people is almost impossible.I tried several other cards but this appears to be the only one on the market that supports 8 external drives.So don't waste your time on any alternatives (other Startech models or Marvell branded cards (they all use similar ASM CHIPS/DRIVERS)) BECAUSE i'VE TRIED THEM. They will WORK with 5 drives although the Startech recognised 6?I switched to USB mode (connection) which works fine whilst waiting for the fix. Will update when this happens.

I've tried loads of these cards from different manufacturers, all claiming that they work with port multipliers (I have an 8 HDD DAS unit, so that's 2X 4 channel multipliers). But in reality, they can only handle the multipliers on one channel at a time. So can't run all 8 HDDs together. But this card actually runs both channels with the multipliers, and does it perfectly. So now I can run my 8 HDD DAS, and can use it as JBOD (which I do) or any available RAID configuration. On top of this, you can use it as extra SATA ports by simply switching the jumpers across the correct pins. Giving you a choice of 2X eSATA, 1X eSATA and 1X SATA or 2X SATA. Very good piece of hardware and a very reasonable price.If I could, I'd give it 10 stars.

Added 1 512gb PCIE NVME card ( very fast ) and 2 SSD 1TB cards ( slower ), PC Boots in a blink, everything runs faster, and quieter than using discrete HDD.The PCIE card is placed on the back of this adaptor, make sure it isn't too close to a neighbouring adaptor card to ensure good ventilation.Strongly suggest any Paging file is placed on an external hard disk, heavy paging activity will contribute to the wear on the SSDs causing premature ageing and potential early loss of available space/failure.[ This particularly applies to Windows systems with less than 16gb Memory, or office style setups using many programs open at once, or teenagers on Gaming programs.]

This card works absolutely fine, but whether it works or not or what speeds you get or whether you can boot has nothing to do with the card but your other components like the drive itself, your bios and motherboard.Think of the card simply as a sort of right angled adapter for your PCIE M2 drive. All it is doing is connecting the pins from the drive to the PCIE slot, so there is really very little to go wrong (I expect any adapter of the same spec would work just as well as long as the wiring and connectors are good).I bought this as the M2 slot on my motherboard was only PCIE Gen 2 x 2 and the drive (Samsung 970 EVO) was being limited by this. Using the adapter in a PCI Gen 3 x 4 slot allowed the drive to get to 3277MB/s up from about 800MB/s in the M2 slot.The drive simply goes into the M2 slot on the card, and the small screw supplied holds the other end of the drive in place. Then just put the card into the corret PCIE slot on your motherboard. The rest is down to BIOS/Software compatibility and configuration. There is nothing to configure on the card itself due to the fact it does not do any sort of processing itself.Fortunately my BIOS (ASUS Maximus VII Ranger) was up to date enough to recognise NVMe drives and so booting directly into Windows 10 was not a problem.I think for what it allowed me to do then it was a good investment, but for what the card actually does I can't give it a full 5 stars on value for money.

Bought this to use in an old Dell Optiplex 7020 machine that had no native capability to use NVME SSD's.Fitting it was easy enough, it just slots in to one of the two PCIe slots on the 7020 mainboard. What I hadn't appreciated initially though was that the BIOS of the 7020 PC had no native support for booting from NVME drives. Did I let that stop me from trying though, hell no.After some searching on everyone's favourite search engine, I found the website of someone who had hacked the Optiplex 7020 BIOS and created a new firmware image containing native UEFI NVME driver support. If you're interested in doing the same, search for tachytelic (dot) net, you should find the article dated from December 2021 that documents the process of building your own custom firmware image.With the custom firmware flashed to the 7020, the StarTech NVME PCIe card installed and some BIOS/UEFI tweaking I found I was able to boot directly from the installed NVME drive on the StarTech add-in card and achieve disk read/write speeds that this system was originally never designed for.Without doing anything this add-in card allows you to take advantage of NVME drives for storage in PC's that were released before NVME storage became a thing. With a little work and persistence in creating a custom firmware image, it's possible to add functionality to an old PC and give it a completely new lease of life.

The product description for this item is very poor. If you intend to use this adapter and have an AHCI SATA M2 SSD be aware that it does not support it. It only supports NVME drives, and the rare NVME drive that can operate in AHCI mode. The product description doesn't state this anywhere, which is very dissapointing.Do not buy this if your M2 drive works in SATA mode.

Used to connect a 4tb m.2 ssd to my motherboard after I ran out of sockets. Worked fine, no setup or driver faff, although I don't boot from that drive, so ymmv.