Review on 🔌 Syba SD-PEX40104: High-Speed Internal SATA 6Gbps Controller Card with 8-Port Expansion Capability by Nolan White

This review is for the 8-port 88SE9215. My intended use was to set up a tiered storage pool with SSDs and HDDs on a Windows 2012 R2 server. The first small issue is that the packaging and instructions are misleading as to what item you actually have. None of it matched. This is the result of manufacturers trying to save money and using the same materials for several similar products. It's not a big problem and I was able to figure it out. The first of the two main problems was that I couldn't use more than 4 ports at the same time. When I did this, any device that was on the stacked ports was not recognized. The device worked fine, when I switched it to other built-in ports it was recognized. I could only use 4 since there are 8 on my motherboard but still expected everything to work. For me, it was a deal breaker that when installing the required driver (instead of the default driver used by Windows), Windows Server doesn't recognize SSD as the SSD media type. This is required to set up a tiered storage pool. Instead, they were showing as an "Unknown" media type, which didn't work. The drives were recognized and working fine, just the wrong media type. Interestingly, using generic Windows drivers this seemed to work without any problems and they showed up in Windows as an SSD media type. This card appears to be having either driver or hardware issues or both, so I was forced to return it in favor of a different one. I think I'm being generous in giving it 2 stars instead of one, but perhaps my use for this is fairly specific and others might not run into these issues.