StarTech 2 Port PCI Express 2.0 SATA III 6Gbps RAID Controller Card with 2x mSATA Slots and HyperDuo SSD Tiering

2025-01-26T19:00:00

This card was running in Windows 10 happily for years. Then I moved it (and the eSATA external drive enclosure it was attached to) to a brand new machine with a fresh Win 11 install. BSOD "MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION" every time I attempted to either boot with the external unit powered on, or power that unit on when the machine had already booted. StarTech "support" refused to respond to my detailed description of the problem leading me to believe THEY KNOW it is not Win 11 compatible but list it as such for the extra sales.

nwmc

Originally posted at

2024-02-06T19:00:00

I have had good experiences with previously bought serial and parallel port expansion cards with low profile brackets from Startech. But on this card it is either the wrong dimensions on the bracket or something with the hole pattern on the card. When mounted, there is a 3-4mm gap left causing me to bend the mainboard when the latch holding the card is locked. Because of this I'm not comfortable using this card. I have tested with a random ethernet card also with a low profile bracket, and this fits just fine in the same computer without bending the mainboard noticeably.

Niclas

Originally posted at

2023-04-06T20:00:00

Firstly I suggest you disconnect all other SATA drives on first install as I suffered a corruption on my system boot SSD disk following installation of the card. It seems very unlikely this was an unlucky coincidence. I've not seen a CTRL-M during any boot though did not exhaustively adjust PC BIOS settings.I have UEFI mode and secure boot so perhaps this is a factor. With all other SATA disks disconnected I followed the instructions to create a Rufus DOS boot disk and the UEFI firmware installed OK.I then attached the SATA SSD boot disk and reinstalled Windows 11. Installed the drivers and the adapter was detected OK. I then connected a couple of 4TB SSD, these were detected OK. Used the MSU Windows software to create a mirror (RAID 1), no issues. I tried the Marvell CLI but didn't get far and the help is sparse on this though I'll find documentation with a search.The email alerting capability looks useful though with modern authentication becoming the norm the SMTP configuration provided will require a relay.

neilg

Originally posted at

2023-03-25T20:00:00

No problems with the functionality of this card. It works great, but assuming due to a driver signing issue, it doesn't work with Secure Boot. Windows 10 gives the sole culprit as the ASMedia Driver v 3.3.2.0 (asstahci64.sys) for not booting in Secure Boot mode. Would be nice to have a compatible driver for Windows 10, but especially when upgrading to Windows 11 that officially requires this feature.

DaveB

Originally posted at

2022-12-01T19:00:00

Did have a problem once with driver (but not related to secureboot - using secureboot from an external drive does not make sense to me). My issue was related to switching modes as well as interface (mirrored to independent as well as eSATA to USB ) BUT Startech support was truly awesome. Certainly one of the best I have encountered. I - like others - have been using the card for some time now.

DTMOC

Originally posted at

2022-06-13T20:00:00

Card has worked well, but I suspect newer firmware and drivers are available as people having issues on Windows 11. Please update

Daveydguk

Originally posted at

2022-05-31T20:00:00

Install Drivers. On Boot BSOD, Driver signing issue. Bypass with F8. Card allowed to see multiple drives. Writing to Drives Fails. (So multiple drives appears not to Work, Driver Clearly does not work. Still looking for any Manufacture tht actually has a tested working card for Windows 11.

Triad17517

Originally posted at

2021-12-01T19:00:00

I've had one of these installed in my PC for over three years and it had s been great. I use WD red Sata drives which are slow but reliable, but pairing them with 256GB mSATA SSDs in a hyperduo mode gives them quasi-SSD speed.

jimalimadingdong

Originally posted at

2021-11-07T19:00:00

Windows refuses to see signed driver and BSOD - Will only work with secure boot disabled

dazz

Originally posted at

2021-07-11T20:00:00

I've bought two of these for storage of video. I run them both as RAID1/hyperduo and get very quick file reads and writes. One runs in a Supermicro X10slq and one in an ASUS Q270. Getting into the rom setup is easy in the supermicro, but a pain on the ASUS (as mentioned in another post). I definitely think it is worth getting to use as a large quick raid especially if you don't have the sata slots.

jimmylimy

Originally posted at

2021-07-01T20:00:00

I had a bit of an ordeal installing this device and thought I would have to send the sata expansion card back, ALWAYS read reviews before you buy something unless you don't mind losing the cash. I found that the BIOS was registering all of the drives that were plugged in, the issue was when I booted into the OS, the drives disappeared. I looked online and loads of people had the same issue and complained to startech. I nearly gave up but went back to it. the responses from startech to the reviews hinted that newer chipsets on motherboards might not be compatible, with this I went back to the bios to take a look around, I started disabling things that suggested to me that they could help, ended up being IOMMU grouping. It was set to Auto by default so I disabled it and the drives appeared once I booted! tldr, IOMMU is cool but doesnt always work.

tbone

Originally posted at

2021-06-16T20:00:00

"By installing your operating system on the M.2 drive, you'll have faster access to the files you commonly use, and you can continue to use your higher-capacity platter HDD for bulk storage." This is false advertising. Per the StarTech Support rep "I just checked and confirmed that this hard drive controller card does not support starting an operating system from a connected hard drive. Therefore this explains why this does not work. I do apologize for the inconvenience."

Smith

Originally posted at

2021-02-04T19:00:00

I bought this product around 3 years ago and it is working flawlessly. The HyperDuo function is wonderful and helps me to use a bigger HDD with high performance at one affordable price.

jbolivarg

Originally posted at

2020-10-14T20:00:00

I had purchased another product which I returned due to quality control issues and I am so glad I did. I am impressed with the quality of this product and installation went as it should...

REMAC

Originally posted at

2020-10-07T20:00:00

The four USB 3.O ports are aligned vertically which allows for more ports, than say one with horizontal ports.

grrbrts

Originally posted at

2020-09-02T20:00:00

It just works. Remember that it has on board jumbers that you need to change in order to connect disks to the inner ports.

Sigma

Originally posted at

2020-07-28T20:00:00

I bought this as a replacement for a faulty SATA 2.0 controller. Works out of the box, although for some strange reason only after I booted the second time, examined the BIOS menu with ctrl-M, and figured I didn't need to change anything for JBOD mode. Overall seems good product. Only minor disadvantage is that it is only a PCIe 2.0 x2 lane, so I'm not mistaken that's max 1 GByte/s, whilst 4 disks could theoretically generate 4x 6 Gbit/s = 3 Gbyte/s (minus overhead).

Freek

Originally posted at

2020-07-08T20:00:00

I have a windows server 2008r2 and within 2 minutes of getting the OS started... it freezes everything and disconnects the remote connection. thought my PSU was going out but it's this card :(. No tech support online that I could find either :(

bmfb1980

Originally posted at

2020-04-10T20:00:00

Does what is suppose to do, better then expected. A somewhat rare thing in today's world.

Radek

Originally posted at

2020-03-06T19:00:00

I purchased this card so that I could add 3 additional SATA hard disk drives to my PC, because my motherboard's 12 SATA ports are all being used. However, the card has caused me nothing but headaches. When I first installed the card, it appeared to be working fine because the hard drives all showed up during POST. It booted into Windows and the hard drives all appeared in My Computer and in disk manager... But that was only for less than 5 minutes. After that, the three hard drives vanished from My Computer and Disk Manager as though they had been unplugged. In an attempt to make the drives show up again, I restarted my computer, only to have it freeze during the Windows boot logo three times in a row. When I read that freezing during boot was a sign of a faulty card, I ordered a second card thinking that I must have just been unlucky with the first. But the second card has the exact same issues as the first! This means that either my luck is REALLY bad, or (more likely) most/all of these cards are defective or bad by design. The three hard drives work properly when attached via a SATA to USB adapter, or when attached directly to the motherboard with either of two brands of SATA cables, so the drives and cables aren't the problem. In my trial-and-error tests, I found that the only thing that differs between when the hard drives work and when they don't is when they are attached via this card. Therefore, it'd definitely be better to look elsewhere if you need an easy to use, stable, and reliably-working PCI-e to SATA card.

jmaeshawn

Originally posted at

2020-02-19T19:00:00

I was glad to find new UEFI bios for the card, yet my external drive connected does not show anymore. When viewing in MSU Software its seems to be a problem with a SATA 3G/Bit fault in the controller. My 6G/bit drives works fine. Is there a solution to this problem.

Agini

Originally posted at

2020-02-09T19:00:00

I have an old Stardom 4-bay HDD enclosure that has an eSATA (3Gbps) and USB 2.0 (480Mbps) port, up until now I've suffered the slow USB 2.0 speeds, but finally decided to give this card a shot to improve my experience (it's either this or get a new $100+ enclosure and toss my old one, pretty easy decision, in my opinion). Installation of the card and drivers were painless, and I doubled my transfer rate; where I used to go about 40~60MBps, I'm now seeing 80~120MBps, which is perfectly fine because that's the physical limit of the 2TB 5400RPM HDDs I'm using, only way I can make it go faster is replacing them with faster drives. My only complaint is the ports on the card are a little high and just barely clear the top of the PCIE bracket, but this likely varies from case to case (I'm using a Fractal Design case, rear panel tooling should be identical across their products).

DeanC

Originally posted at

2019-11-20T19:00:00

It was defective out of the box. It did not work. I had Dell L3 folks working with me trying to get it to work. StarTech products are excellent, so this is probably just a random hardware failure.

Keith

Originally posted at

2019-11-12T19:00:00

Trying to get this card working in a Dell Optiplex 3060 box. The motherboard has 3 PCIe x1 slots and 1 x16 slot. The manual stated that it will work in an x16 slot, but after installing the card and booting, the Dell logo pops up and just sits there. It has been like this for a hour and I cannot even enter BIOS. Apparently, your documentation isn't worth the paper it's printed on. The card is worth even less. I'll be returning it today unless I hear from support.

PCJohn

Originally posted at

2019-10-27T20:00:00

I have bought 6 of these and used them for SuSe Linux Enterprise and OS/2 as the boot drive device using raid 1. They all have worked without any problems. The throughput is good but not as fast as not having a raid. I bought a backup controller that can replace an existing one if needed. Easy to configure (once you discover the CRTL-M to enter setup).

gregp6

Originally posted at

2019-06-24T20:00:00

I bought this card hoping to allow me to hook up a couple more SATA devices. The system a Win 7 64 bit does not even see the card

mxgirl75

Originally posted at

2019-03-03T19:00:00

Boot under 1809 possible, yet system significant slower than under 1803. Worst: my 4 RAID 10 HDD with the OS on it are shown as "removable drive". No proposals from MS & forums do the fix up-to-date.

1809problem

Originally posted at

2019-01-01T19:00:00

Hi! I like the product, but I have a question. How can I disable the hot swat function under windows 10 in single disc mode? I was able to disable it in windows 7 in Device Manager, but in win 10 I can't find this function.

Barakna

Originally posted at

2018-12-20T19:00:00

1st installed and system(s) just came up with black screen: no system BIOS, errors or "Control-M" messages. BIOS MUST be set to PCIe Gen2 and legacy boot to get anywhere and then I still did not get a card BIOS setup message (Control-M for card setup). Accidentally accessed by hitting the keys during startup.

Eric D.

Originally posted at

2018-10-31T20:00:00

Hello, recently purchased. Spiceworks poster. Used this recently in a Gaming PC build, 2x 970 evo 512GB with 1x 6TB WD Blue = up to 800mbps throughput from or to NVME System drive. I had initial issues with conflicts but I eventually got the card and my system working. copied my existing HDD to it, launched some games. Games like total War: Warhammer have gone down as much as less then a minute from a fresh boot not to mention No man's Sky which will load in about a minute. HyperDuo is simply, incredible. Needed this card as I had a small case and I really needed more space for games, two of my four sata MB headers were blocked by fans so I saw this card and was keen to try the HyperDuo feature.

Adam2329

Originally posted at