IO CRESTDual M.2 B-Key SATA SSD Converter PCI Express 3.0 x1 Expansion Card Heat Sink Jmicron JMB582 Chipset SI-PEX40153

I didn't have very high expectations for this when I got it, and just needed something cheap, but it ended up impressing me quite a bit.

This is a fantastic add on card, particularly for adding SATA III ports to otherwise good motherboards that only have SATA II, or simply have too few ports.My workstation (Win7 64 environment) and gaming system is fairly robust, consisting of:Socket 1366 EVGA X58 SLI LE motherboard (circa 2009)Intel Core i7 970 hexacore CPU12GB DDR3EVGA GTX 570Definitely not a slouch. What it was lacking in, was SATA III ports. I use an SSD on my boot drive, but its speed was being held back by SATA II. Having recently bought a SATA III 128GB OCZ Vertex 4 SSD, I wanted to appreciate the drive's very good performance, without plunking down a couple hundred dollars just for a SATA III motherboard for an outdated socket. Real world performance on the 128GB OCZ Vertex 4 was such that I could reasonably expect to see 450MB/s for sequential read/write speeds, with an optimal SATA 3 controller.Being fully cognizant that I am only spending a miniscule $17 on a budget brand card to add a couple SATA 3 ports, where there previously were none, I bought this with understanding that it would be unlikely for me to see the 450MB/s read/write performance that others were seeing as it were with more robust SATA 3 controllers. So I bought this IoCrest/Syba PCIE card. It delivered.Running several benchmarks with AS SSD, I tested the 128GB Sata III OCZ SSD as it performed with the onboard SATA II, versus this add on card's SATA III.Onboard SATA2- Read/Write average: 266/235 MB/sAdd-On budget SATA 3- Read/Write average: 371/364 MB/sGreat! Very respectable! This $17 card provided a nearly 50% increase in read/write performance over SATA 2, which exactly fits the bill for what I was looking for. As long as you are not expecting pinnacle performance from this, you can reasonably expect to see a decent speed boost if you are upgrading from SATA 2.There are some installation nuances that one needs to consider when installing this for bootable drives, that I think others who negatively rated this product may have not considered:-Set your BIOS SATA controllers to AHCI mode, not IDE. A lot of people forget to set this, as most motherboards default to IDE. IDE will artificially slow your drives and possibly create conflicts with this card.-The hardware/card should be installed first, without attaching any drives to it. This is so Windows can recognize the hardware and make the appropriate changes to the OS. Once booted into Windows, install the drivers (I went to the Syba website and downloaded the latest, rather than using those on the disk) and restart, insuring that the device is fully recognized. Failure to do this and you are almost guaranteed a blue screen.-Once you ensure that Windows recognizes this, turn off your computer and attach your boot drive to this card. Turn back on go back into your BIOS and make sure you set hard drive boot priority to this drive. Newer motherboards should have the ability to select and detect bootable add on cards. It should appear as "SCSI Add On Card" with your hard drive model listed next to it. Most consumer motherboards (Asus, Gigabyte, EVGA, Foxconn, etc) will support this.!! -If you are using a prebuilt PC, such as from Dell, HP, etc, your BIOS is likely locked down, and this card will probably not work for you if you intend to use it for bootable drives. If you are in this category, you will most likely only be able to use this for secondary non-boot drives.Overall, I'm extremely satisfied with this product and have picked up a couple more of these cards, to increase the number of drives I could attach to various computers. Zero problems to report on 4 wildly different PCs.

I purchased the IOCREST SB-PEX40039 with the Asmedia (ASM1061) SATA controller to add a LG Bluray (WH14NS40) SATA optical drive. My Dell XPS Gen 4 had all four SATA ports used to support two virtual RAID 1 drives that have served me well for several years now. So I needed an additional SATA port and this card offered to add two more SATA ports at an economical price.I did previously purchased a more costly Silverstone TEK PCIE card. But it played havoc with my Dell PC causing it to fail to boot. I quickly returned it since my PC boots fine without it. Thanks Amazon for your much appreciated return policy that keeps me coming back to make more purchases.According to the Dell specification for my PC the PCIE (PCI-Express) x1 port is capable of bidirectional transfer of 500 MB/s. This approximately fits the PCIE 2.0 specification of 250 MB/s (in each direction). So I assumed that the PCIE socket on this PC was a SATA II (300 MB/s) capable socket.For those of you who are planning to purchase this card you should be aware that the approximate transfer rate you will get with this card installed on your PC is primarily dependent on SATA specification of the motherboard and the specific PCIE socket you install it in (x1, x4, x16, etc). That is, if your motherboard only supports SATA I well you can only expect SATA 1 transfer rate and not SATA III with this card installed.That said this card can support SATA III if your motherboard’s PCIE socket supports it. For older PCs your best bet will be installing this card in a PCIE x16 socket for maximum transfer rate and not in an x1 socket if one is available. My PC had no x16 socket available so I was stuck with the x1 socket.I installed this card in my available x1 socket attached the Blu-ray drive and rebooted. The PC booted fine displaying the Asmedia boot information. The only problem was that the PC BIOS complained that I needed to depress the F1 key to continue or F2 to enter the BIOS. I latter discovered that I caused the problem since I disconnected and removed the old PATA optical drive and failed to disabled it in the BIOS. Once I disabled the PATA port the IOCREST card has been working beautifully so far but only as “Gen 1” SATA ports (SATA 1). That’s fine with me since burning Blu-ray disc is a slow process to begin with and a faster SATA transfer rate won’t help much. Yes, I can play Blu-ray movies with the open VLC player that buffers its input.Since my PC is a multi-boot system with Microsoft Windows XP, Windows 7 and Window 8 I was able to test the card in all three Operating Systems (OSs). The card works fine in all three as advertised. The tricky part was installing the driver for this card in each of the three OSs.The included instructions in the README file located on the mini CD disc are helpful but not correct. Apparently, they are in need of updating. For example, in Win7 after rebooting the system recognized the card as a “Standard SATA IO Controller.” Running the Win7 “Setup.exe” file installed the correct driver without incident. For Win8 I followed the instructions located at the Sybausa.com website to manually install the correct driver on the CD disc for my 64 bit Win8 system. For WinXP I cancelled the WinXP search for the driver and ran the WinXP “Setup.exe” on the CD without incident.So in summary the IOCREST card works as advertised on my multi-boot Windows PC albeit as SATA I ports. Installing the driver for the card is straight forward running the appropriate “Setup.exe” file located on the mini-CD or SYBIA website for WinXP and Win7. For Win8 you may need to manually install the approximate driver as per the SYBIA instructions located on their website.Lastly, I can recommend the card for similar Dell PCs as my Dell XPS Gen4 PC. Just make sure you have the lasted BIOS installed and disable in the BIOS any I/O ports you are not using or disconnected. As mentioned in many of the reviews make sure that ACHI is enabled in the BIOS. For my system that meant setting “RAID/ACHI” which in my case it was already set. Hope this helps! Thanks SYBIA I can now get a few more years of use out of my reliable DELL PC. You just need to update your driver installation instructions.

Worked flawlessly as a plug & play solution for adding an extra drive to my Unraid server