Review on 💻 I/O Crest 4 Port SATA III PCI-e 2.0 x2 Non-RAID Controller Card with Marvell 9235 Chipset for Hard Drives by Jesus Carlson

I really wish I would like the I/O CREST SI-PEX40057 (4-port Marvell 88SE9230) which I used first and SI-PEX40062 (4-port Marvell 88SE9235) which I bought as a replacement. They're fast, affordable, and easy to install, set up, and use... with one big caveat: instability. Each card functioned properly for several months before experiencing intermittent failures. Sometimes a card fails to enumerate or initialize. Sometimes attached drives return too many I/O errors. Sometimes they become distant. Sometimes the car freezes or panics. It is common for multiple channels to fail at the same time, causing their drives to become disabled. Often each card will work for minutes or hours before failing. I have concluded that this is an overheating issue for a number of reasons. First, the onset of reliability degradation on the order of three months is a classic manifestation of an inadequate thermal solution. In addition, high I/O bandwidth usually leads to failures within a few minutes. Similarly, filling just one or two ports seems to prevent dropouts. Finally, running the computer with the case open and a fan blowing a lot of air around the card provides the longest usage time: about half a day. I accounted for device aging and the dependence of thermal hysteresis on machine duty cycle, I/O intensity, daytime ambient temperature, and finally even weather. Needless to say, I'm migrating my storage pool of maps. The great thing is that ZFS doesn't care which drive is connected to which port, and raidz2 lets you take two drives offline at once without crashing. It should take a few more power cycles to complete rsync. =-) I might have a lesson to learn here about getting rid of hardware asap.