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Review on Enhance Storage Efficiency with StarTech.com 1 Port PCI Express IDE Controller Adapter Card - ATA - 133 MBps - PCIe x1 (PEX2IDE) by Robert Xayamonty

Revainrating 4 out of 5

Suitable for adding more hard drives to a RAID Btrfs

Works great on Linux defined as "IDE Controller JMicron Technology Corp." JMB368" and when the PC boots up this is the first thing you see on the screen see the bios of this controller I had a couple of spare IDE/PATA drives taking up drawer space, a slightly newer WD3200AAJB and a 10 year old ST3160023A but they worked before so I just plugged them in the Jumpered accordingly and grabbed an old 80 wire cable and that was it They are now running as part of a btrfs RAID 1 with a pair of WD Red and WD Blue, all these drives together give me 2.5TB Reading each one 80 MB/s is achieved as expected, but when master and slave disks are accessed simultaneously, the throughput is halved to a maximum of 40 MB/s each Fortunately, btrfs cleans up small er drives are given less priority, so it's time to access them to get data, but btrfs keeps updating the metadata. So far so good, it has allowed me to use very old technology effectively in a seamless and transparent way and it doesn't have a huge impact on performance. Let's see how long these IDE/PATA drives survive.

Pros
  • Certified
Cons
  • Annoyed