Review on 🔧 Vantec UGT-ST644R: 4-Channel SATA 6Gb/s PCIe RAID Host Card with HyperDuo Technology - Enhanced Data Management and Speed by James Mcphearson

My motherboard has more than enough SATA ports for all my internal and external drives, but its hot-swap feature doesn't work very well - it tends to blue screen when I swap out an external drive. (Not my boot drive - I *hope* that's obvious.) After doing a little research, I found that the chipset on this Vantec card is known to be the most resilient to hot-swap drives, but damn, if i could find a card with this chipset that also had no option rom bios. I didn't want to use SIOS with option ROM on my optional SATA card as I will never boot from an external drive and don't want my computer to boot slower waiting for option ROM. BIOS to sync with motherboard onboard BIOS. So I bought two of these cards and decided to experiment - I just unsoldered the Option ROM BIOS chip from the card and it worked! So this card was 90% what I needed to start with, it didn't explode when I modified it, and it's been stable and reliable for years. I would say it deserves at least 4 stars. ATTN VANTEC: If you want 5 stars, replace the soldered option rom bios with a socketed option rom bios so it can be removed by people without soldering skills. This connector adds just pennies to the cost of each card, making this card useful to more people.