Rosewill RC-211 PCI Express SATA II (3.0Gb/s) Controller Card

Comment:
Good price. Straightforward install. Smaller card takes up small area. Fantastic performance. No conflicts with any of my other cards in technique. Just like most of these items the included installation directions are poorly written and in some places are incorrect. If you are brand new to installing these forms of cards, including the use of drivers, then seek advice from some third party documentation. I really much like how little the card is. It sits subsequent to my SLI video card and does not restrict any airflow to the heat sink and fan. Efficiency is great. I did not run any tests but I can tell that it is faster than the JBOD config I was working with prior to installing card. Windows boots faster and all my programs load faster, also.

Comment:
Works faultlessly for adding additional non-RAID SATA-2 Ɠ Gbs and NCQ) ports. See "Other Thoughts" for my XP installation procedure that was determined by significantly trial-and-error. I assume that if you take the installation in a logical, step-by-step manner then you will a minimum of difficulties. For RAID-based boot drives that have a motherboard RAID chip I strongly advocate each enabling the mobo's RAID chip and also installing the mobo's RAID driver. Use the "F6" choice at OS install time or merge the two drivers into the OS install disc (Use nLite or vLite for the merge.). If your mobo DOES NOT have RAID capability you may well have to set the RC-211's jumper to the other position. This causes an auto-install of a BIOS driver from the RC-211 when initially booting up. Installation with a (nVidia) mobo that already has a RAID chip is a bit involved, but straightforward. This is not a con. You just require to be methodical. Directions for an nVidia RAID-capable mobo (Biostar NF4U AM2G) on XP: 1) Restart, divert to the BIOS and allow the onboard nVidia RAID device. Do *NOT* choose any tough drives to be component of a RAID configuration. Save the BIOS settings, which will cause a restart. ---- two) Upon reboot XP will want drivers for the nVidia mobo RAID chip. Install them. Do *NOT* choose any hard drives to be portion of a RAID configuration. ---- three) Shut down. Plug in the Rosewill RC-211 card. Do *NOT* plug in any difficult drives to the RC-211. Start out up. Device Manage will now list each the Silicon Image SiL 3132 and the nVidia chip as RAID controllers. ---- four) Shut down. Plug in 1 or 2 SATA drives to the RC-211 card. Boot up. The new drives will now be shown in Windows Explorer. Performed! Is this procedure seriously that difficult ??

Comment:
It's low-cost. The quality of this card is poor. It feels flimsy and weak. I've applied a quantity of Rosewill goods and they're cheap for a purpose (they're junk.) Spend additional for a respectable brand unless you like adding to your nearby landfill. Manufacturer Response:Dear Valued Client,We are sorry for the inconvenience this may possibly have induced you. We attempt to give the most trustworthy products to our shoppers. We would be far more than happy to replace this unit for you at our expense. Please e mail us at rma@rosewill.com for your replacement. We appear forward to hear from you soon.Thanks,Rosewill Customer Care

Comment:
1. Straightforward install - (plug it in, dude)two. Quickly! PCIE ;-Ɲ. compatible with FreeNAS four. not too finicky 1. only two internal SATA ports2. No support for RAID53. could've been cheaper Bought this to use in FreeNAS server I built for home network. Purchased particularly for FreeNAS and pleased to uncover that it was right away recognized and promptly worked with no any drivers or config.. Presently supporting two Hitachi 1TB in RAID1 array. I'm a pleased camper.

Comment:
It fit in my final open port on the board. Works as advertised. I'd had trouble with my onboard raid configuration operating at the very same time as an SSD boot drive so I purchased this and it fixed the dilemma. The drives cook at raid now. Not seriously a con, but it covers up element of the fan on my graphics card.

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It has a jumper on it that makes it possible for you to disable the BIOS on it for easy JBOD, or in my case software program raid setups (not certain if this has any influence on AHCI). Functions very good in Linux, no drivers or code compiling essential. Reputable Silicon Image controller. Only has 2 SATA ports. I could care less about it's total throughput, I want a lot more SATA ports for storage space. You can get a 4 port SATA PCI card but not a 1x PCI express card? That's not right at all.. I can't speak significantly for it's speed. afaik it's a quite quickly card but I'm using a mix of old/new 500GB drives in computer software raid 6, so I doubt it's actually going to be able to push the card significantly.

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Effortless to install. It took Vista a even though to locate the drivers on the internet and install them. None

Comment:
low-cost card for mobos that dont have raid. really modest, on my ds3l board i t fit under the gtx 260. cpu load was minimal as properly, around two-4 percent. not bad for softraid. straightforward to install on vista with supplied cd. the only negative side to this is not the best read occasions. with a bench i got around 120mb/s max with two wd 500gb drives in raid . that is a decent speed but could be superior. cd wont function for xp so youll go through a small bit of added time to make a floppy i purchased this for my p35-ds3l which doesnt have onboard raid and its a decent card to slap some old hdd's in raid . my other board which is a p45-ud3p gets a lot more read speed with the ich10r, about 190mb/s. again, nice little card for motherboards that do not have onboard raid. just wish it was a small bit faster.

Comment:
Extremely good card and easy to install, working perfectly in RAID i use 2X64 GB patroit SSD run like bullet. absolutely nothing

Comment:
No issue setting up RAID0 with two SATA drives. Functions fine. Drivers a bit confusing, no floppy disk included which produced installing XP on the RAID0 a bit far more of a task. Minus an egg.

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Anything about it worked as expected. I just necessary an additional SATA port for my BD-ROM, and it worked properly. I can boot from the drive, play Blu-Ray discs, load Windows, every little thing I need to have to do. If you want firmware updates, you have to get them from the SiliconImage web site, and it's a bit confusing which ones to grab. The download page on Rosewill's web site doesn't seem to be updated sufficient for a person that likes to be ultra existing. Temporarily hooked up a SATA three HDD and that worked great too. By no means benchmarked it though...

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Low cost and may well function for a person, not for me! RAID would degrade for the duration of my burn in testing of only 5 days just following a power cycle. I only employed two HDD drives which randomly re-park heads through typically usage. (hate that noise) I replaced the card for a veteran Adaptec item. This production just did not perform for me. Here is clearly a case of you get what you paid for. I have applied greater-end RAID cards in servers to midrange cards and even onboard RAID and this product was the worst of the worst. The manufactures web page has limited assistance, confusing driving/bios notes, and no FAQ’s to speak off, devote the 20 bucks and get a different item.

Comment:
Working just fine as additional SATA ports for 1 HDD and 1 Optical drive. Will hot swap HDD just fine in Vista/Windows 7 No cons truly. Asus MB - AMD CPU - onboard RAID BIOS and Rosewill card BIOS both 'play well' with each other.

Comment:
Works! Works on W7 soon after driver installPOST is a bit slow Thats basically it, just install the windows driver on the internet to get it to function

Comment:
Great cost Originally bought this to setup a boot RAID1 in WinXP. But this card is essentially a software RAID card. Which can't boot. I used it in one more personal computer as a storage RAID1. And it works good. Just an FYI to everyone searching at this card. Newegg must almost certainly note the capability to boot.

Comment:
none I purchased this to set up 2 1tb tough drives in RAID 1 for backup. So I installed this in my laptop or computer with the software program and tried to set up the raid. I even followed the directions specifically. Didn't perform. With some tweaking I was able to get the challenging drives to set up in a raid. But I was curious to see if the data I transferred was on both difficult drives so I took them out of the card and plugged them directly into my laptop or computer. The data on the one hd showed up as corrupted, and the other hd was blank. Incredibly disappointing.Also I don't thinks this works as a boot device. Save your money and get a motherboard that is raid compatible or just buy truly very good backup software. Manufacturer Response:Dear Valued Customer,We are sorry for the inconvenience this could have triggered you. We attempt to offer the most reliable merchandise to our shoppers. The issue you are getting may possibly be brought on by a driver concern. Please attempt installing the drivers from our web page. If you are still having a issue, please give us a call at 800-575-9885 so we may further assist you. We appear forward to hear from you soon.Thanks,Rosewill Client CareExternal Link(s): Rosewill RC-211 Driver|

Comment:
Its low cost. Doesn't function as a boot device, at least not for Dell computers, at least that's what their tech told me. I installed the card on a Vostro 220s, booted into Windows XP Pro and loaded the newest drivers from their site. I then rebooted, went into the card bios and set up a raid 1 array. On reboot, I blue screened. From there on I blue screened on each and every boot regardless of no matter if or not the card was in the machine. I couldn't even get into a safe mode dos prompt. Spend the other ุ-โ and get a good, reputable card. Manufacturer Response:Dear Valued Client,We are sorry for the inconvenience this could have caused you. We attempt to provide the most dependable products to our customers. The challenge you are getting may well be triggered by a difficulty with your Windows XP. Windows XP may have been corrupted when setting the Raid up and is causing the Blue Screens. Please try reinstalling Windows and this need to sole your issues. If you are in need to have of a replacement, we would be additional than happy to replace this unit for you. Please e-mail us at rma@rosewill.com for your replacement. We look forward to hear from you soon.Thanks,Rosewill Consumer Care

Comment:
The various varieties of ports available make this reader a good selection if it just worked. lol DOA!!!. I read some reviews with the similar problems but have constantly been able to depend on Rosewill. The time and price of sending it back are hardly worth the ฟ to ship it back.

Comment:
I purchased this card to extend my onboard SATA from four connections to 6.This card is full plug and play I did not have to install any other software just plugged it in and turned it on. Another plus is that I run OpenSolaris on this machine and the drivers in OpenSolaris build 86 saw the card and the drives connected without any external configurations.Generally great dealing with NewEgg. Card arrived next day. Only two slots but this was all I required so Not truly a Con. NewEgg Rocks!Thanks

Comment:
Works OK as a software program RAID board. I set it up RAID 1 under Vista 32 Ultimate. I was able to set up the RAID array working with their Vista utility. Drivers and BIOS update downloaded from the Web worked fine. This controller is not compatible with an MSI K9A2CF motherboard. I later discovered from MSI that there isn't adequate ROM space to load the Rosewill controller BIOS (or any other RAID controller BIOS). So I couldn't use the Rosewill controlled array as a boot device as planned. So I had to RMA the controller.

Comment:
Soon after using the jumper to turn off the device BIOS, FreeNAS was able to see both drives connected to it. Throughput is roughly what 1 can anticipate from software program RAID/ZFS. None at this time.

Comment:
- Effortless to recognize/follow manual- Low and high profile bracket- Raid ǗJBOD support via its own BIOS chip- Affordable - None for the cost! I bought this in order to go from 1 SSD OCZ Vertex Turbo to two working in Raid . My MOBO has 4 SATA sockets and I have three other HDs for media and automized backups via Acronis true image 2010. Do not enable your MOBOs Raid, this controller will show up when booting up, just press F4 to go into its BIOS to set up a Raid. I had the set up configured in less than an hour!

Comment:
Have to add to a previous review...this card did not let me down when i had to reinstall windows on my ssd boot drive. Reinstalled the driver for the raid of two 300gb raptors and right away started working with all my files. Reliability is nice to know. stated previously, but reliability for storage produced my day.

Comment:
Low cost and basic installation. Worked 1st time out of the box. None. Interfaces with my CD Drive without a challenge.

Comment:
The card is small and affordable. Installing was fairly much a "figure it out yourself" kind of thing. The manual that was included was apparently translated, poorly at that, from an additional language. I'm not positive weither I was having hardware conflicts or software program mainly because I'm using Vista. Anyways there was an actual decrease in speed going from just 1 74gb Raptor to two 74gb Raptors in a RAID array! This lasted a month and I took it out, reformated, and put my tough drives how they had been prior to. Once again, not sure if its Vista that caused the speed loss, but I downloaded the latest drivers from the manufacture's website and still no boost in speed. ??? I don't know. Manufacturer Response:Dear Valued Customer,We are sorry for the inconvenience this may possibly have caused you. The difficulty you are having may be caused by Vista or a driver problem. Please try updating your drivers from Microsoft internet site. If you are still having difficulties, please give us a call at 800-575-9885 so we may well further assist you. We appear forward to hear from you soon.Thanks,Rosewill Customer Care