StarTech.com 2 Port SATA 6 Gbps PCI Express eSATA Controller Card – Storage Controller – 2 Channel – eSATA 6Gb/s – 6 Gbit/s – PCIe – PEXESAT32

Dropping one star because I lost 8TB of data, more on that below.

3rd time lucky because this StarTech PEXSAT31E1 host card actually works as advertised compared to two previous host cards I had to return. I had purchased a simple 5-bay external hard drive enclosure and I needed a host card with a port multiplier (PM) to recognize all 5 drives. I purchased the external enclosure as redundancy for an internal 5x2TB spanned volume that held the 8TB of data mentioned up top. The first host card I purchased was an IOCrest SI-PEX40060, its PM recognized all five drives but then it failed to work due to write timeouts reported by the Marvell MSU software. The second host card was a Vantec UGT-ST644R which advertised 6-ports unfortunately its PM could only recognize 4 of my 5 drives. I have discovered that StarTech is the only company to report the PM capacity on their site under Technical Specifications. Other companies only report PM support for multiple drives which is meaningless.

Regarding performance of this host card I’m seeing average of 1Gbps transfer rate between an internal 2x3TB spanned volume and the external 5x2TB volume. This is reading from internal and writing to external. Very happy with this performance.

So the unlucky part, since I installed this card I lost 8TB worth of data from an internal 5x2TB spanned volume. Somehow the volume got corrupted, I have experienced this twice now. Initially I pointed the finger at the Marvell MSU software for creating RAID arrays but have since confirmed the drivers for the host card caused the data loss (see 3 tips below).

I had initially wanted to create a hardware RAID 0 for my 5x2TB external drives but the Marvell MSU RAID software would not let me create an array greater than 2 drives. After mucking about in the MSU app, I noticed my internal 5x2TB volume was missing. In the Windows, Create and Format hard drive partitions app it showed that the Dynamic drives were now labeled as Foreign. This is where I might have been able to avoid data loss if I’d been thinking straight (see below).

3 tips for host card install:
1. If you are fine using no RAID or software RAID (in Windows), try to see if the host card will work straight out of the box in Windows 10, this worked for me for both this host card and the Vantec card.

2. If you are dead set on using the hardware RAID capabilities of the host card along with the Marvell MSU software or equivalent software, beware the data corrupting capabilities of even the latest version of the drivers for the host card. I installed the driver initially because I though the host card was not working with my enclosure. After I installed the driver same result, no lights on my enclosure, at least not until I powered the enclosure off and back on. At this point I should have uninstalled the driver and retested, that may have saved my 8TB of data from being corrupted. In my case even for RAID 0 the Marvell MSU software would not work it would only allow a 2 drive array to be created. With the previous IOCrest host card (the first host card I purchased and had to return) after I installed their latest driver for the card, it was the first piece of software to blue screen my PC forcing me to do a full Recovery from Backup.

3. I might have saved my 8TB of data if I had been thinking straight at the time. When I saw that my internal 5x2TB volume was missing and discovered it had been corrupted, since its Dynamic disks were now being labeled as Foreign, there were two potential (but not guaranteed) ways to recover . The first is to right-click on a drive and select Load Foreign drive, this may allow the volume to be recovered. The second was to simply reboot and see if the volume would recover on its own. I did neither, I simply assumed the volume was already permanently lost and I guaranteed that by flipping all the disks from Dynamic back to Basic in order to recreate a 5x2TB spanned volume.

Not the end of the world for my lost 8TB (8TB is too large to add to Backup so hence Redundancy) , I already had “redundancy” for my data in the cloud and on physical media. For example, home videos with the kid’s growing up on VHS tape. We still have the tapes and the camera, I can transfer these to hard drive again. So don’t throw those out just in case you wind up with the same situation.

had no Problems configuring on a linux debian machine and was able to connect my external Hdd dock

This PCIe eSATA Card do have a 6Gbps Speed with 1.5Gbps negotiated speed. Transfer speed is as good as internal drives.