StarTechcom 2 Port SATA 6 Gbps PCI Express SATA Controller Card - Dual Port PCIe SATA III Card Adapter (PEXSAT32), Red/Silver

I purchased the excellent 'budget' Samsung 840 250GB SATA Solid State Drive for use with my wife's old MESH gaming PC fitted with a 5 year old Asus P5NE-Sli motherboard and a 3Ghz Intel 8400 core2 duo processor, running Windows 7 64-bit. However on installing the SSD I discovered that AHCI (Advance Host Controller Interface) isn't implemented on this motherboards 3Gbps SATA2 interface which will adversely affect SSD speeds, and I found the Samsung 840 drive ran significantly slower than similar ACHI enabled 840 SSDs in our other SATA2 PCs - with my quad Core2 PC's SSD running at 266 Mbps sequential read and 258 Mbps sequential write and my wife's SSD only achieving 133 Mbps and 110 Mbps respectively, as measured by CrystalDiskMark 3 disk benchmark freeware. In comparison our best Western Digital Black 1Tb mechanical SATA-3 HDD hard drive had sequential read/writes of 114 Mbps and 110 Mbps (although our older WD Green and Seagate HDD drives only achieved 20 to 50% of that respectively). However random read/writes of small 512k & 4k files was still 5 to 50 times faster with the SSDs compared to our hi-spec Western Digital 1Tb Black mechanical hard drives. So although the wife's SSD was still zippier than her modern Seagate and Western Digital mechanical hard drives, I felt things could be improved. Plus this StarTech PCIe card gives us two extra internal SATA3 ports in addition the four SATA2 ports already in use on the motherboard, and these could be set to RAID with identical twin hard drives.Fortunately the Asus P5NE-Sli had a free 16x PCIe Sli (rev 2) slot which offers the theoretical 16x PCIe speed of 8 Gb/s and can take any size PCIe card. So I purchased this Startech 2 port SATA PCIe to use in that second 16x slot (note that a 1x PCIe slot on this rev.2 motherboard only runs at 500 Mbps (0.5Gbps), so this 6Gbps PCIe SATA3 card will struggle in lower x1 and x4 speed PCIe slots). Although technically using both 16x PCIe slots in the motherboard will drop the bandwidth to 8x on each slot, adding this SATA card didn't affect our NVidia 9600GT graphics card fps performance. Fitting the Startech card was easy after I bent the top of the rear plate slightly to prevent screwing the card in raising the rear of the card out of our PCIe slot. As others have said here, Windows 7 64-bit didn't recognise the SATA3 cards Marvel chip, but I simply downloaded and installed the driver direct from the product listing on StarTech UK's website and then the card worked perfectly. The card's twin SATA ports are quite a way from our hard drive bays, and my 12" SATA cable only just reached the nearest port (you may need a longer cable).I was worried that the PC wouldn't boot from this StarTech PCIe SATA card, but the Asus P5NE-Sli motherboard BIOS recognised the Samsung SSD and allowed me to give it boot priority. The PC booted up from the Samsung 840 SSD and CrystalDiskmark now gave sequential read/writes of 207 Mbps and 160 Mbps respectively, an 180% and 145% increase over the speed via the motherboards own SATA2 ports, and not far off the SSD benchmarks in my AHCI enabled PC. Although this StarTech PCIe SATA3 card apparently has AHCI enabled, I couldn't get Windows 7 to activate it for the SSD, even if I temporarily deactivated the motherboards SATA ports, so the Samsung SSD still runs without AHCI enabled. I can access this PCIe cards BIOS using Cntrl-M at bootup, but I couldn't do much with a single SSD fitted (it's more for setting up RAID configurations).As we got real speed gains that are noticeable in use, the card was relatively cheap at £30 compared the SSD and easy to get running, and it adds a useful extra two SATA ports, we are happy with both its performance and value, so 5*. However our increase in SSD read/write speed was largely due to the poorly implemented SATA2 interface on the PCs Asus P5NE-Sli motherboard and the availability of a free 16x/8x PCIe slot - SATA2 speeds on our other AHCI enabled older gaming PCs SSDs were faster than that achieved with this nominally 'SATA3' card in the 8x rev2 PCIe slot. Still this StarTech card also provides an extra two SATA ports that would be fine for optical and secondary mechanical hard drives, and it offers the option of RAID configuration with twin hard drives. Plus if you can get AHCI running with it, the cards read/write speeds will improve. This StarTech PCIe card was supplied in a simple cardboard box so it would be easy to return to Amazon if it didn't meet expectations.Update Aug 2014: The Asus P5NE-Sli motherboard has NVidia chips for the system bus and the twin Sli 16x PCIe slots and the PC has an NVidia GT 9600 graphics card with 512Mb ram. When I tried to replace this GT 9600 with an Asus AMD Radeon HD 6670 Graphics Card with 2Gb graphics memory the new graphics card definitely interfered with the operation of this Startech SATA6 card in the second 16x PCIe slot. The BIOS kept resetting the boot order away from the SSD to the internal secondary hard drive and the PC couldn't boot up unless I went into the BIOS and changed the boot order every time the PC was started. Sometimes the SSD on this Startech SATA card was recognised in BIOS, occasionally it wasn't. Turned out the old NVIdia GT 9600 graphics was faster than the new AMD one anyway, so I bought a new fan for the old GT 9600 and returned it to the primary 16x PCIe slots and the PC has been working fine ever since. Seems like it was an AMD hardware and/or Windows AMD graphics driver conflict of some sort with the motherboards NVidia secondary 16x SLi slot.

Faulty used item supplied. The box had a second Sellotape applied to close it. The manual clearly states it comes with a full height bracket installed, but the low profile bracket was fitted, indicating it was already used. Very unhappy to be sold a faulty and used item.

I have a relatively old PC based on an ASUS P7P55D LE motherboard. (LGA1156 socket). I am running Windows 10.1 and little while ago installed a Samsung EVO 850 SSD to improve boot times etc. Recently, one of my optical drives (SATA 2) disappeared from Windows; after switching cables etc. I concluded there may be an issue with the motherboard SATA port to which it was attached. I have a load of hard drives installed and all the motherboard SATA sockets were in use so had no spare. I purchased this in order that could connect that optical drive. After installing, a pretty simple task, I found it works perfectly. No drivers to install, drive instantly recognised by Windows etc.I also did an experiment to determine whether my Samsung SSD Boot drive would work if attached to this card. The answer is yes. I connected my SSD to the 2nd port of this card and after juggling HDD boot priorities in BIOS, booted into Windows without issue,Theoretically, my SATA 3 SSD should be faster connected to this card than it is connected to the motherboard SATA 2 port. Single channel PC-E v2.0 (this card) theoretically operates at 500MB/s (in each direction) so is theoretically faster than SATA 2 (300MB/s) and closer to the SATA 3 600MB/s the SSD could operate at. So in theory, if the SSD were the only thing attached to the PCI-E SATA card (ie nothing else was sharing the PCI-E channel), I should get closer to the SATA 3 speeds afforded by the SSD.Theory is a great thing and whilst I think there was a slight improvement there are so many other factors that in reality, this configuration yields no noticeable improvement but adds another component into the chain of things that might go wrong. I concluded that I would keep the SSD connected to the motherboard port and thus eliminate one potential failure point.In summary, this card works perfectly (so far) and has provided me with what I needed, additional internal SATA ports. Based on my experimentation, I am able to get an SSD boot drive working with little effort. In terms of the latter, I would not assume this would work with all motherboards, but works fine with my ASUS P7P55D.