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Romania, Bucharest
1 Level
732 Review
55 Karma

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

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Works great with my IDE optical drives!

I bought the PEX2IDE after not being able to use any other controller card with the Marvell 88SE912x chipset. I wanted to use an old BenQ DD DW1650 CD/DVD recorder in my Haswell Z87 (i7-4770k) system to check the disc burning quality, but IDE controllers are long gone from motherboards. Unfortunately, the IDE channel on the Marvell chipset that I first tried didn't work well with the BenQ drive. Other than the controller card that didn't work, StarTech PEX2IDE uses the JMB368 chipset. PEX2IDE had no problem supporting BenQ DW1650 drive. The hard drive was recognized by the card's BIOS and the system booted normally. On Windows 7 x64 SP1, I didn't have to manually download drivers for the card. Contrary to the results of some other testers, the drive runs great at full speed on the PEX2IDE. There are no slowdowns or high CPU usage. I also tested PEX2IDE with a second IDE optical drive attached before writing this. I've used an Optiarc AD-7200A as a second IDE optical drive and haven't encountered any problems. Both drives showed up on the card's BIOS screen and worked fine in Windows.

Pros
  • Satisfied so far
Cons
  • Hard to remember but it was