StarTech Startech.com 2 Slot Pci Express M.2 Sata Iii Controller Ngff Card Adapter

I am using this card as part of my TrueNAS builds. TrueNAS recommends using hard drives not USB drives. This allows me to have a self-mirrored copy of the OS and other files. The only down side for TrueNAS is you cannot make the disk size smaller than the whole drive. :( I would recommend this card for those who do NOT want to use a SATA port.

I installed this unit with two WD M.2 SATA SSDs in an HP SFF desktop. Only 1 was visible to the system. Made note of the serial number, and swapped the SSDs and then the different serial was visible. StarTech support was quick to work through the troubleshooting process with me. They recommended a return which Amazon made fast and easy. I didn't have a way of adding power to the 4 pin floppy connector to see if that was the issue with my unit, but it said you don't have too. Instead of a replacement, I went with StarTech SATA to M.2 drive tray adapters, since I had spare headers on the motherboard and room in the case, and I could split the existing SATA power connector easily.

CentOS 8.4 (stock kernel: 4.18.0-305.3.1.el8) hates this card. Installed it after the OS was provisioned onto separate drives, so that I could use 2x M.2 SATA SSDs for bulk storage (860 EVO, brand new drives). Upon boot the kernel crashes due to ata driver issues. It never gets to the end of init 3 for login. Then I tried FreeBSD 13-release since this server is used for dual-booting; it recognizes the drives while running the installer and I can geom inspect them, however installation fails due to write errors. Usually Startech stuff is great with linux and FBSD, but in this case the SATA controller is completely unusable. [ 268.405258] PE[0fd] A/B: 8000802301000000 8000000f3ce40440 [ 268.405258] PE[0fd] A/B: 8000802301000000 8000000f3ce40440 [ 268.455938] EEH: Beginning: 'error_detected(permanent failure)' [ 268.455938] EEH: Beginning: 'error_detected(permanent failure)' [ 268.507314] PCI 0001:01:00.0#00fd: EEH: not actionable (1,1,1) [ 268.507314] PCI 0001:01:00.0#00fd: EEH: not actionable (1,1,1) [ 268.507315] EEH: Finished:'error_detected(permanent failure)' [ 268.507315] EEH: Finished:'error_detected(permanent failure)' [ 268.559030] WARNING: CPU: 80 PID: 876 at drivers/ata/libata-core.c:6679 ata_port_detach+0x8c/0x1f0 [libata] [ 268.559030] WARNING: CPU: 80 PID: 876 at drivers/ata/libata-core.c:6679 ata_port_detach+0x8c/0x1f0 [libata] [ 272.380818] Call Trace: [ 272.380818] Call Trace: [ 272.391670] [c000000ff33b7a70] [c0080000081d4fa4] ata_port_detach+0x7c/0x1f0 [libata] (unreliable) [ 272.391670] [c000000ff33b7a70] [c0080000081d4fa4] ata_port_detach+0x7c/0x1f0 [libata] (unreliable)

I have this low power Mini ITX mobo with 4 SATA ports on it. All of them are in use on the FreeNAS. I was using the suggested setup of mirrored USB drives. 2 little Sandisk Cruisers. After about a year one of them failed. I replaced it then a few months later the other one failed. I don't think they are bad devices, they just aren't rated for 24/7 use. Anyway I needed another solution. I had a single PCI-e slot to work with. I picked up some cheapo M.2 "controller" not realizing it needed SATA cables to work. Oops. So I did some more digging and found this. I didn't need the speed of NVMe. I mean this system was running off 2 USB sticks just fine. Given how cheap SATA controllers are I felt this was a little expensive. I mean I could get a 2 port PCIe SATA controller for like $12 USD. Anyway I've worked with StarTech stuff before and it's always seemed to be good quality. After some reading it looked like the controller chip on this would be happy to play with FreeNAS. I installed this 32GB Trancend SATA M.2 drive, installed the card in the machine and re-installed FreeNAS. Imported my 2 mirrored arrays, tweaked some settings, let it reboot like 6 times as I changed things and it did it's import process, make sure all my imported settings worked, then shut it down, installed the other M.2 drive, booted back up, setup the boot drive mirror and boom, perfection. No more USD drives hanging out of the back and it works great. Final thoughts. I think for the money, it's worth it. There are more expensive solutions out there but the instructions are great and it seems well made. I waited 4 months before I wrote this review. Card length is a consideration as well. My FreeNAS machine is in a Fractal Design Node 304. The case itself has room, But there are a lot of power supply and SATA cables running around in there. It was a little tight. Warning: Some BIOS's don't like to boot off PCIe devices. Try and do some research before buying this. If you happen to have a cheapo PCIe SATA controller laying around. Put a bootable drive on it, even a CD-ROM/DVD and see if it boots. Generally if you're in the BIOS and you can see it as a boot option, you're golden. All that said, if you're reading this review and considering buying one of these, you probably know what you're doing. Hope this was helpful.

This 2-port (B-key SATA) card worked out of the box in my FreeBSD 10.3 system (presumably Linux support is just as easy). No problems with running it in an old system's PCIe 2.0 x16 slot, despite the vendor website specs calling for PCIe 3.0. The BIOS identifies this card as Asmedia 106x, and FreeBSD sees it as a 12-port 6Gbps Port Multiplier (presumably it's the same chipset as the version with the SATA passthrough). FreeBSD dmesg output: kernel: ahci0: mem 0xf9ffe000-0xf9ffffff irq 28 at device 0.0 on pci1 kernel: ahci0: AHCI v1.31 with 12 6Gbps ports, Port Multiplier supported Although the card has a 4-pin (floppy style) power connector, it seems to run fine without the extra juice. The manual indicates it can run on *either* PCIe bus power or external power. In my case, bus power seems to be enough. I'm currently running it with a pair of Crucial MX300 m.2 drives, no problems so far, though the PCIe 2 bus bottlenecks when both drives run flat out. Either drive can read at 450MB/s, but both together top out at 360MB/s each (I think the bus, could be the controller). It's likely the performance would be higher in a PCIe 3.x slot. I'll update if there's any unexpected performance or stability issues, but I wanted to review with the info that I was seeking before buying. Recommended (so far).