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

I bought this card to install on my Windows Server 2019 PC and let me tell you that I am very sorry. This thing crashes the server randomly, and when it does I have to force it down. Sometimes the RAID array just disappears, which is annoying, especially when you're in the middle of your favorite Plex streaming video. I've bought Vantec products in the past so I was drawn to this card and should take the bad reviews a little more seriously. If you want to add more SATA ports or need RAID on…

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…

I was just looking for PCIe bandwidth and thought this misleading product also offers x4 PCIe 2.0 connection. That's about 550MB/s * 4, which is 750MB/s that SATA III can deliver, and with four channels I could harness the power of all four drives in a software raid with the card in JBOD mode. Not so. It's PCIe x2, so four channels is meaningless. Worse, the device negotiates x1, which doesn't even support the full bandwidth for a single high-performance SATA SSD. Complete garbage. Misleading…

The speed of this card matches the advertised speed of SATA III 6G. Although my name's hard drives, including several WD Red drives, don't meet the 6G rating on their labels, my SSDs get faster 6G connections. I'm not using RAID yet, but as a standard board it works fine. The only issue I've encountered is that the board won't boot from a clean install of Windows or Ubuntu running in UEFI. Luckily I work in IT so it only took me two hours to figure out why my supposedly good HD and ISO weren't…

This card works RAID 0 with four incompatible 250g SSDs which equals 1TB. These drives were from previous builds and weren't really used, so it was great to put them together this way. Two months, no problems so far. I use this raid array for editing/processing photos and videos, not for storage. Installing the card was easy, and the BIOS interface is fairly straightforward when setting up a raid. It is PCIe 2.0 and requires at least a 4 lane PCIe slot. I am using an LGA1155 board with a 3770k…