Review on 💻 I/O Crest 4 Port SATA III PCI-e 2.0 x2 Non-RAID Controller Card with Marvell 9235 Chipset for Hard Drives by Jeremy Romero

running Dell T130 e3-1225v5 with x2 4TB HGST CoolSpin. The card required adding a special .vib file to esxi even to recognize it (don't expect to see this in the BIOS). Once I had it, I switched it to pass-through mode and connected it to FreeNAS. Everything was working fine (surprisingly) until some extensive testing last night resulted in timeouts and I/O issues with the card/disks. Both data carriers are new, there are no errors, but the card has become unusable. I restarted the virtual machine host (!) and the map became visible again. FreeNAS started and it started accessing recovery/import disks, but it crashed again (timeouts, I/O errors). Shut down the host, move the card to the CPU direct PCIe slot (bottom), and switch to the other two ports on the controller. Everything loaded, no errors so far. Moving data back and forth to see if I can reproduce the issue. A few words of warning if you plan to do something like this. It's not an easy walk in the park and I'm not sure how stable it is (yet), but I'll report my findings. UPDATE: So far so good (tested for a few weeks, ZFS scrubs, etc.). No mistakes.