SYBA SY-PCI40026 PCI Low Profile SATA II (3.0Gb/s) RAID Controller Card

Pros: Cheap and easy to setup.

Cons: Every time you reboot your system, the array is put into "restore redundancy". It means your system (I/O) is greatly reduced. And if you have a large array, it will takes many hours to complete. But then again, if you have to reboot, the restore redundancy repeats.

Other Thoughts: Just stick with the built-in motherboard support for RAID.

Pros: Works as advertised, and gives me a few extra SATA ports.

Cons: doesn't come with a full height profile plate, but that is not an issue since it is advertised as a low profile board. I had another brace I used with the board.

Other Thoughts: I purchased this card to give me an additional drive slot on my motherboard because all of my SATA drive slots were filled with Hard drives. This board is running my CD-Drive in my server and gives me three additional SATA slots for the same price I would have paid for a board with less slots. Th only issue I found with it was that while it works great with my motherboards BIOS boot up, once Windows Server kicks in I had to use my USB external drive to complete the installation becuase the driver was not in the Windows list so it could not read the drive once it got to intial set-up. Something to keep in mind if you plan on using this as your primary drive controller for the drives you are installing your OS from or to.

Pros: Inexpensive way to add 4 SATAII ports to old MB with old fashioned PCI slot.

Cons: Description clearly states OS support is: windows 2000, server 2003, XP, and Vista. In spite of that I got this to build a freenas server from an old MB with limited SATA cause some web forums suggested this chipset was compatible. In case you're trying to do the same thing, my experience is: FreeNas 8 doesn't even see the disks. FreeNas 7 does work but has some problems with ZFS file system stability and this card. Server 2008 Standard 32bit, though not listed as supported, works just fine for me and this card (you have to install drivers by chipset choice).

Other Thoughts: Got this as an open box from newegg in excellent condition. Never had an open box problem with newegg. Driver disk was included and had the same drivers as latest on manufacturer web site.

Pros: Cheap
Low Profile metal piece can be easily removed for customers not realizing what exactly Low Profile means until they try to fit it in their case.
Works, after a bit of work, with Windows 7 x64

Cons: Zero or outdated information.
I had to search for support based on the chipset.

Other Thoughts: Research Silicon Image SIL3124 for software if you're trying to use this controller on Win 7 x64.

Pros: a great RAID card at a great price. The built in menu system is very easy and you can manually set it up or let it do it for you. I did both to see how it would work and it works great. Very easy.

Cons: A bit slow to detect three Hitachi hard drives during boot process. But after that it runs pretty quick.

Other Thoughts: If you are looking for an item or build a VMWare ESXi (version 4.1) box, this item IS NOT compatible. As you know it is very hard to try and find compatible items to build a VM Server box these days.

Pros: Once the device is recognized, works great!

Cons: Took quite a bit of work to get the driver to finally be recognized by Windows 7 64-bit. Driver must be downloaded from Syba.