VANTEC 6-Port SATA II 150 PCI Host Card Model UGT-ST310R

Comment:
I was looking for a PCI card for my server to expand my drive capacity. I ended up getting this for 4x2TB green drives (my backup drives) while my main 4x2TB greens reside on the motherboard.works perfectly in linux. I recently ordered another one of these because for some reason, all my EARX drives residing on the motherboard had their partition tables corrupted. I won't chance that again.

Comment:
Works OK as JOBD, but does not function in the raid 1 mode. Each time computer starts up a message appears 'improper shut down, need to rebuild raid'. I've given up and use it in the JOBD mode. For raid purposes I'm sure there are better products than this one. If you are just adding drives it works good.

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I was able to add two SATA DVD drives and one hard drive on my old pc and they work just fine.

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I was needing a card to add to my server cause i have 11 SATA devices, and I only 6 on board. I picked this up hoping this card would work in my server cause it is very picky about what I put into it. Well this card works very well in my configureation and is able to see my 1.5 Terabyte hard drives. Vantec has always made very good products and have been very happy with their products. The install was very easy and the server search online and downloaded the drivers with any trouble.

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My old SATA card would not work with the new Hitachi Deskstar 1TB drives. They recommended this one and it works nicely. Please note it provides 4 SATA Ports. All 4 internal or up to 2 can be external. I am not using RAID in this PC, so am not testing RAID on this card.

Comment:
Environment: SBS 2003. Needed a dual external eSATA configuration that could seemlessly handle an exchange of external hard drives. Found the dip switch settings a bit archaic, but it worked well. Absolutely no issues in handling drive changes, which has not been true with several other products tried.

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I build a hardware raid 5 with this card and use it with Linux ubuntu 9.10 and it have been recognize immediately. i'm happy. with this card.

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I used this in a software RAID 5 set up. Since it's for home use I didn't need a top of the line controller or even sata II capability. Keep in mind that sata I will limit the bandwidth to 150MBps and doesn't support NCQ so your sata II drives won't show their full performance. Still, it's perfect for my use and has worked excellently in both Windows Server 2008 and Opensuse 11.2. I'm getting 70-80MBps write speeds and 120MBps and up read speeds from the 5TB RAID over a 1Gbps network.

Comment:
It seems to work fine. However, it is advertised as a 6 port device. While it does have six places to plug wires, the jumpers only allow you to use four of the ports at once, according to the manual. There are 4 internal and 2 exernal ports.

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I used this controller for a Plextor DVD drive I bought. It went in fine and seemed to be working well until my system crashed. Upon rebuild is where the system had trouble locating the right drivers for the controller board. Once located, everything was again good. I'm still not sure why the 2 different setup & configuration processes were needed. I only have 1 drive hooked up so far but plan on expanding that for hard drives.

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I thought I needed 1 internal SATA connector, but thought Id play safe. Glad I did. Easy install, works great.

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I bought one of the cheaper ones first and was VERY dissatisfied with the placment of the ESATA port and I could only get one SATA port to work, but wasn't worth returning as defective. This one worked perfectly with Windows XP. I am currently running it with 3 internal 1Tb drives and 1 1TB external drive in a docking station for backups.It works great. The SATA ports are solid and constuction is good. You need to change jumpers to select which ports to use. The jumper selection is well documented . Spend the extra money and be sure.

Comment:
Installed in my Windows Home Server (with Server 2003 drivers) to provide SATA HDD support as my old motherboard only supports PATA. Would have been worth changing the motherboard instead but that would have required a new CPU, memory etc