Review on 🔌 I/O CREST 2 Port SATA III Controller Card (PCI-e 2.0 x1) - ASM1061 Non-Raid with Low Profile Bracket - SY-PEX40039 by Sam Carter

This IO Crest card with 2 SATA III PCI-E 1x ports with ASmedia ASM1601 controller is the least Linux compatible device I've ever used. I tried this on Ubuntu 17.10 on Xen on an Asus Prime X370 Pro motherboard with a Toshiba SSD attached to it. The board is a UEFI board and the CSM has been enabled. The system boots normally and I see an additional boot screen from the card's option ROM where it recognizes my attached drive with no problems. The card was indeed recognized by Linux and tried to communicate with the drive. Unfortunately, that's how I understood it. The card had I/O errors trying to communicate with the attached drive, causing Linux to give up and disconnect the drive from the system. The drive works fine on my motherboard's built-in SATA controller. Also, when installing this device, I got errors in dmesg from my video driver (nouveau); I don't know how to explain it and the video still worked fine. However, all this could be ignored. The device doesn't really support Linux and I wanted to use the device to pass PCI to the Windows guest, so Linux shouldn't really work properly with it. But the real problem I have with this card is this: it causes the `lspci` command which lists installed PCI-E cards to crash the system! Running lspci, which normally takes a few tenths of a second, would take a second or more with the card installed (and freeze the entire machine for that time), and one out of three times I've run it managed to crash the whole system . Some research suggests this can happen when a PCI device reports garbled configuration information. This problem probably won't go away if I pass the card to a Windows VM, even if the VM can get the card to actually talk to the drives. Of course, I can't omit any hardware that allows a non-privileged user to shut down an entire machine with a single command. I need to trade for a more reliable card with a more useful interpretation of the PCI-E specification.