Review on 🚀 IO CREST SI-PEX40059: High-Speed 2 Port SATA 6Gbps & 1 Port ATA133 IDE PCIe Card - Enhanced Data Transfer Performance! by Steven Murray

This controller is hot swappable and almost plug and forget in Debian 6. I have these cards with the Kingwin KF-1000 Tray -BK without a hot-plug drive coupled adapter as part of our remote backup strategy. We are very happy. Hot paste works great. Plug in the drive and it will automatically boot, registering at the SCSI level and creating the appropriate /dev/sdX and /dev/sdXN device nodes. With the right hotplug setup, you can also mount disk partitions automatically, but we didn't want that for our use case. Hot delete works great too. Turn off the drive first to avoid unwanted data loss. We use the Debian 6 Proxmox VE kernel, which still supports the old /proc/scsi/sci interface. This allows you to use the scsiadd utility (on newer kernels you can use the script provided with the scsitools package). To remove a drive, we have a script that unmounts all active partitions and then issues scsiadd -r. Calling scsiadd unregisters the drive and stops it so that it can be removed. We've done about 25 hot-swap cycles on servers so far without a break. The servers have not restarted since installing the new hardware. This hot swap board is very reliable thanks to the SIL3132 chipset. I assume this will be the case with every version of Linux, even older versions since the chipset is quite old. It's just a single lane PCIe SATA II controller, and other reviewers say its bandwidth is limited to around 125 MB/s. . This exceeds the typical I/O performance of most SATA drives, so controller performance isn't really a limitation for us. I wouldn't use this card for multiple drives or SSDs unless you can live with the performance hit. There are newer controllers out there, but we wanted hot-swap reliability on Linux, and this one delivers. I am considering buying some spares in case this card becomes less available in the years to come. hp Apparently there is separate firmware that can be downloaded to this card to remove RAID functionality. Our cards came with RAID-enabled firmware. We don't need or want RAID features, but we believe that the default RAID-enabled firmware causes problems. So I can't comment on the available non-RAID firmware.