Review on 🔌 StarTech.com PCIe eSATA Controller Card - 2 Port SATA 6 Gbps - 6Gb/s - 6 Gbit/s - PEXESAT32 by Troy Jennings

I bought some cards and chipsets to try with a JMicron535 8-drive port multiplier enclosure running ZFS RAIDZ2. The StarTech PEXESAT32 was $26, had a Marvell 88SE9230 chipset, 2 eSATA ports but only 1 PCIe lane. Setting iommu=pt (passthru) on the grub command line transparently detected the drives in the enclosure. I can see that they are on a specific bus, but other than that they look like they are connected directly to the motherboard and work the same when used independently. When sending very large files I get 15-20% more throughput for my SSD than RAID through the controller (individual drives are slow and can't compete with SSD), but this could be a striping artifact. Since I get the *best* performance with this controller in the interleave set when processing 1k 1M files, I assume that's the case. A NOTICE. The card only supports one port multiplier at a time. However, at this price I was happy to get two cards and use two otherwise empty PCIe slots. I've tested RocketRAID 622 (returned terribly promptly), RocketRAID 644L and RocketRAID 642L and am waiting for a couple of SIL and ASMedia cards. . The Startech PEXESAT32 tests for each lane were identical to the much more expensive RocketRAID cards. But I should mention that while the 642L and 644L support multiple lanes and should therefore support multiple port multipliers, this didn't work for me. I haven't tried finding and compiling their drivers as I don't support the latest non-DKMS supported drivers. I'd rather just buy 2 StarTech cards and some spares and call it work. YMMV. Some benchmarks: SSD ADATA_SP550 via integrated SATA 890FX chipset dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/dd_test_out bs=1G count=1 --> 566 MB/s dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/ dd_test_out bs =1M count=1000 --> 385 MB/s RAIDZ 8 hard disk over 2x PEXESAT32 dd if=/dev/zero of=/TEST5/dd_test_out bs=1G count=1 --> 466 MB/s dd if=/ dev / zero of=/TEST5/dd_test_out bs=1M count=1000 -> 606 MB/s RAIDZ2 8 hard disk over 2x PEXESAT32 dd if=/dev/zero of=/TEST6/dd_test_out bs=1G count=1 -> 446 MB / s dd if=/dev/zero of=/TEST6/dd_test_out bs=1M count=1000 --> 537 MB/s Seagate Skyhawk ST4000VX007 via integrated SATA 890FX chipset dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs =1G count=1 --> 127 MB/s dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M count=1000 --> 152 MB/sWestern Digital WDC_WD40EFRX direct write via PEXESAT32 dd if=/dev / zero of=/dev/sdd bs=1G count=1 --> 147 MB/s dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdd bs=1M count=1000 --> 168 MB/s