Review on 🔧 Enhanced Performance Vantec UGT-ST622 PCIe Host Card with 2 Channels and 4 Ports for SATA 6Gbps Connectivity by Jeff Jackson

I bought it for HTPC/Mediaserver. It used to be Windows Home Server 2011, but I recently upgraded to Windows 8.1 Pro (64-bit) for better sharing. How to use this Vantec 4-channel 6-port card can be simple or complex, but the user manual that comes with it will explain it to you very well. Your options are really only 4 internal, 2 external, so be aware of that limitation. Here's how it should work: Install the software, shut down the machine, install the card, power the machine back on, and from the boot time plane you're ready to set up your RAID array (more on that in a moment). Two notes though: 1) Out of curiosity I decided to just plug in the card and some drives, boot up and see what Plug and Play does. It worked on Windows 8.1 Pro, found the drivers, installed them and then saw four separate drives. From here you could probably use Windows disk space to create your own software array if you wish, but I've decided to go the other way and use the boot setup. I installed the software and on reboot I was able to press Ctrl+M to access the software during boot. 2) I don't think you can just take an existing RAID array, pop its elements into this card and go. - I think the hard array assumption is that you need to create an array for this controller. The situation is different with soft arrays; If you had a different experience, let me know in the comments! When you open the download software, it's easy if you read the manual first. They want you to select the drives that the controller sees, and if you proceed, a "virtual drive" will be created. From there, the virtual disk is defined as the type of array you want to create (0, 1, 5, etc.). The really cool thing about the load time setting is that if you want, you can create a hybrid array like you would in a professional data center. For example, you can have three spinning hard drives and one SSD and then make those your array. From there, you can instruct the system to use the SSD to cache high-demand data (and spinning disks hold "stale" data), giving you some redundancy since high-access data exists in both places are; or you could say that high demand files remain on the SSD and are moved to spinning disks when they become "stale". In both cases the controller manages this for you. If I were creating videos I would probably use this feature, but I only want to stream video so a RAID 0 of four identical drives was fine for me. If you want to stack 4 internal drives together, this card is for you. Ability to use different options (some reviewers seem to use it with JBOD as well). Helpfully, you get 2 extra external ports, but you can disable them if bandwidth is important to you. Anyway I liked the software, the fact that it came with a decent manual and so far it's been really easy to use and has worked well for me.