Rosewill RC-211 Silicon Image 2 Port SATA II PCI Express Host Controller Card RAID 0/1/0+1/5 JBOD

Great cheap option for an extra 2 SATA ports but there is one problem. Never disconnect the SATA cables after they are plugged into the card. Any SATA cable will strip the surrounding plastic connectors on the card regardless of how careful you are when disconnecting. Thankfully, I only needed a single SATA expansion for my setup so I can live with this card and it's single functional connector but for anyone looking for connectors that are actually durable, look elsewhere.

I'm using it as a Raid 1 with two 500GB WD Blue HDDs on an Asus P5KPL-CM motherboard running Vista 64. I found it fairly easy to install and set up and it has not given any real trouble. An abnormal shutdown of my system resulted in one rebuild of the mirror which went smoothly and did not interfere with operations.

Well, let's see - the product claims RAID 5, but only has two ports. This makes RAID 5 impossible, as does RAID 0+1, which also requires a minimum of 3 drives. Although I have not used the product I find the impossible claims of supported RAID types too much for me to bring myself to make this purchase.

I used 2 of these in a linux (Ubuntu) file server and it ran flawlessly for 2 years until the server was decommissioned.