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PCI to 2 External 2 Internal SATA II Ports Controller Card - SIL3124 | 
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| Brand: eforcity
Category: CE
Buy New: $37.34
Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 3000
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3
MPN: PCRDSATACON5
UPC: 877083084308
EAN: 0877083084308
ASIN: B001A4O5NI
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | Upgrade your system by expanding two extra internal Serial ATA ( e-SATA ) ports and 2 external e-SATA ports with this Plug and Play PCI controller card | | • | RAID Controller supports RAID Level 0, RAID Level 1, and JBODPCI | | • | Supports the latest NCQ (Native Command Queue) hard disks | | • | Support 32-bit at 66 MHz and 64-bit at 133 MHz | | • | Supports Windows 2000 / Server 2003 / XP / XP 64-Bit / Vista, and Linux OS |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
PCI Interface Compliant with PCI-X 1.0a specification Interface 33 MHz operation Supports PCI 2X mode and PCI native modes Complies with PCI Local Bus Specification Revision 2.2 Serial ATA Interface >Backward compatible with Serial ATA specification Revision 1.0 Supports 4 independent SATA ports Support data transfer rate up to 3 GB/s (SATA II) Connectors: internal Serial ATA II (SATA 2) ports 2 external e-SATA II ports Package includes PCI Serial SATA II 4 Channel (2 external / 2 internal) Controller Card Driver CD User Manual Supports Windows 2000 / Server 2003 / XP / XP 64-Bit / Vista, and Linux OS
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| Customer Reviews:
 Works perfectly with Linux December 29, 2008
RCP (Texas)
I have SuSE 10.3 Linux and my external eSATA hard drive attaches via this card and works perfectly. There were no issues. No special set-up steps. No need to use the drivers, nor anything else, that came on the included CD.
All recent Linux versions include support for the chipset used by this card. It is a fairly common and popular chipset -- SIL3124. Most (probably all) will detect the new hardware at the next boot and do whatever it takes to activate it.
The card's firmware is accessible during the boot process and can be used to set up a hardware RAID configuration. If you are interested in RAID but don't know much about it Google for "admin's raid data recovery guide". That talks about recovering data from hardware failures but it has a very good introduction to RAID in general, comparing hardware vs software RAID. (I am in no way affiliated with that web site or the company behind it.) I ignored the RAID setup as I am using just a single drive as a simple backup medium.
All the above is good and unless you have a fairly old version of Linux you can ignore the rest...
OLDER LINUX VERSION? READ ON.
I also have an older Linux (SuSE 9.3) and that didn't go so well. Note that SuSE is now at version 11.x so 9.3 is pretty old. The card comes with a CD containing drivers for older Linux versions, including SuSE 9.3. Unfortunately, there are a couple of problems with this:
1) The CD has a complex install script with hard-coded values that don't look right for my configuration. I decided not to run the script as it messes with things I don't trust it to mess with. Fortunately copying the driver from the CD to the proper directory is pretty simple. Configuring the system to boot from a drive connected via this card would be trickier and that is one part of the CD's install script I don't trust. Good thing I didn't run this as it would have messed up badly -- see number 2 ...
2) On my updated SuSE 9.3 the driver module loads but immediately crashes. I *think* this is because of the following: Even though the CD has drivers for SuSE 9.3 the drivers were built for the kernel version shipped with SuSE 9.3, not the newer kernel(s) installed via periodic updates from SuSE. Thus my SuSE 9.3 is older than the card (and therefore does not provide a driver for it) but its updated kernel is newer than the driver provided on the CD (and the driver therefore does not work).
There are also drivers for older versions of Fedora and RedHat (and of course Mac and Windows too). It is possible those systems might not run into the problems I did with SuSE 9.3.
BUT -- with any reasonably new version of Linux the support for this chipset (SIL3124) is already a standard driver included with the kernel so there is no need for any of the above hocus-pocus.
BOTTOM LINE
Works great with recent Linux versions but older stuff might have trouble.
 false advertising September 7, 2008
Curley Joe
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The Amazon specs say "Support 32-bit at 66 MHz and 64-bit at 133 MHz". This is a lie. This is not a 64-bit PCI card (which would be twice as long), but a 32-bit PCI card. Just look at the Amazon picture, then look up PCI on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Component_Interconnect) and you'll see that this card is indeed 32-bit PCI.
Also, it does not run at 66 MHz. The box clearly says, "Support 32-bit at 33MHz". To run at 66 Mhz it would need to support 3.3 volts, and many reviewers at NewEgg.com have said that it does not support 3.3 volts.
Lastly, when I connected it to a 3 Gb/s SATA II disk, the controller's property sheet clearly said that's running in SATA I mode at 1.5 Gb/s.
So, this product's claims are false.
Faultless July 21, 2008
Photoguy (United States)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I needed this card in order to run an external SATA drive, on a system that did not have built in SATA interface. It installed easily and ran perfectly. I was up and running in under 10 minutes.
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