Review on IO Crest Port PCI Express SI PEX40094 by Jeremy Bradford

I bought this because I wanted to switch my media center array from Windows Spaces to motherboard RAID to preserve a significant chunk of storage space (Spaces take 1/3 for distributed parity !), which meant removing my boot drive from the internal controller. I also wanted to use the latest motherboard port for the array. I was sad to find out that the firmware only supports booting in CSM or BIOS mode. My initial setup and configuration was UEFI only mode, and the card doesn't seem to have UEFI enabled firmware, so it won't be able to boot without changing the Windows installation from UEFI to BIOS. UEFI doesn't even see the ports on the card when the CSM is off, and when it's on it fails to boot due to a fatal error (GPT drive to boot, and yes I installed the card and booted from the SATA motherboard before shutting down and moving the boot drive). To be honest it's surprising at this price point that it supports downloads at all, so I'm not that upset. It's just a complex project that I wanted to avoid. To be honest I haven't seen a bootable SATA UEFI controller outside of the (cheap) server market.