Sabrent SATA-2PRD eSATA Raid External 2-Ports + 5V/12V DC output PCI card Card

List Price: $24.99 Discount Price: $22.99

Features:

• Support Inquiries - Support@kinamax.com

Customer Reviews:

Needs a little work from you [Posted on 2008-04-15]
This card does everything it is supposed to, at the price it is a steal. There is just one snag with it - it is shipped without the BIOS code installed, even though there is a "RAID" sticker on the EEPROM. It will install on your PC as a Sil 3512 SATAlink device (you will find it in Windows' device manager under SCSI devices), complete the install as such, Windows will find the correct driver for it. The manual says it will show in the BIOS during bootup, but that is initially not enabled.

Once the card is installed as a standard device, you need to download the latest BIOS code for the 3512 from the Silicon Image website, and install ("flash") this through the above device entry. Only then does it become a RAID controller, and you will see the BIOS entry during the boot of your PC. The Java application that is on the driver diskette included, and the manual with that driver, will now work. Ignore the manual when you first install the card, only the above procedure will work. Before upgrading (actually installing) the BIOS code, the card will work as a standard disk controller card.

I have this running with two Seagate Freeagent 750 GB drives Seagate ST307504FPA1E2-RK FreeAgent Pro 750 GB USB/eSATA External Hard Drive, and so far it works as advertised, I am quite happy with the speed and the functionality of the device. I have tested both RAID 1 (mirroring, slows you down a bit but is very secure) and RAID 0 (striping, speeds up writes and reads, and is secure in that it does load distribution among the drives). It says it is capable of RAID 10 (combination of striping and mirroring) as well, I have not tested that, and that may require 2x2 daisychained drives, which would scare me, there are four port cards available that would be better for that function.

Be aware this is software RAID, not hardware RAID, and a power failure or computer crash during a disk write can still seriously damage the data on one or more disks, and this RAID solution is NOT hot swappable.. I would not use this device without a UPS, one that will power down your system in an orderly fashion when a power failure occurs. If you want hardware RAID, take a look at the Western Digital My Book Pro 1.5TB My Book Pro II USB/FW products - because of their interfaces, though, these won't run at half the speed of an eSATA drive, which has a nominal throughput of 1.5 Gb/sec. If you are planning to use this card under Windows 98SE (I have tested this) it will work, but you may need to reformat the drives, as most come preformatted for the NTFS file system, and Windows 98 will only recognize the FAT32 file system.

Menno Aartsen
Fredericksburg, VA
[...]

Click here for more details and discount information...