Like many others, I needed to add more drives than I had SATA ports on my motherboard. So, I bought the 8 port version figuring that I'd run out of room in my case before I run out of SATA ports. Not a bad position to be in considering that programs (especially games) are taking more hard drive real estate all the time.

I read about the card hanging in bootup if you didn't have any drives connected. I connected a 1TB SSD and a 10TB regular HD to it prior to powering up. It still hangs for about 20 seconds which really negates investing in an M.2 as my OS bootup device.

The "manual" is short, but hardly sweet. The portion explaining the jumpers for SATA and ESATA were easy to understand, but not the recommendation if the card hangs with drives connected. It says to give PCI boot priority if it hangs. I can only assume that it's referring to the MB bios, but I don't see anything in my X299 Prime ASUS Deluxe bios or it's manual.

If and when I can resolve the hanging on bootup I'd rate this device with 5 stars as the speed is nearly as good as the MB's SATA.

This is for the 8 channel SI-PEX40071 with 88SE9705 chipset (steps later may be applicable to other card, though).

First card I got, one of the SATA ports' inner plastic connector broke off in my cable while fiddling around with it (not rough, mind you!), the card is pretty flimsy. The SATA cables being connected pull on the SATA connector stacks and shift them a bit. Also only 4 out of 8 ports worked, one stack wasn't recognized on boot (there's a screen that shows before the BIOS splash that lists the drives connected) or in Windows.

Second one held together but still only 1 stack was working, not 2. Searching around for help I found no one with a solution. Googling "IO Crest SI-PEX40071" led me to a sybausa site. On the site in the Downloads section I found the two files needed to get Windows to see them. "Windows Manual Driver Installation" is a text file that tells you how to install the drivers and "Windows 7, 8, 10" is the actual driver.

After installing it as the text file described, it worked and Windows saw the other set of ports. I have not tried using the card yet or seeing how it performs. Hassle but so far it technically works.

I purchased this 8 port controller to replace the second HP P411 controller. Why I did is another story. After connecting (8) 4TB Seagate hard drives and powering up the server expecting to see 8 happy new 4TB drives available what I saw confirmed what other's who report single star ratings for this product. Only (3) of the new 4TB drives showed up. What was really frustrating is that I needed the space NOW. So I prepped the four and configured them as RAID 5 in my storage pool then thin parity so I could scale as my needs grew.

Within 12 hours, after I had begun moving data to the partition it became degraded and off line. It's waiting for the missing drive to come back on line.

At this point I'm pulling the 8 Port controller and will replace it with (2) 4 Port controllers as another reviewer suggested.

If you buy one of these 8 Port controllers and experience problems later, remember the single star reviews and hope you have a backup. Thankfully I control my own backups and will go to Plan B. Extend the Labor Day vacation to 10 days while I locate replacement 4 Port controllers and move data around until all of my data is settled in the correct configuration.

Then this 8 Port useless piece of tin, fiberglass and silicone will be returned with a note recommending they stop selling this model.

Take the 1 star reviewers' advice and get something different unless you're ready to gamble with your data.

Once I got past all of the negative reviews I found this to be a great addition to my older system. The problem wasn't that this card received a lot of bad reviews, it was that Amazon lumped all the reviews together for various Marvell based cards. After sorting through all of the various reviews and selecting only those that actually applied to te 88SE9230 specific card I found it mostly had 4 or more stars. After checking to be sure I had an available PCIe 2.0 x2 slot (Had an x8 slot) I ordered this board. Under Windows 10 I just had to plug in the board, run the Sata cables, disable the motherboard Sata controller, and power up in the safe mode. Safe mode power up was needed so Windows 10 could install the AHCI drivers. Wish I could give Amazon one star for the way they lump together the reviews.

I replaced another eSATA card I had recently purchased (which simply just did not work!) with this one. This one is working fine for me on Windows 7 with a new Skylake Core i5 (yes I know it's supposedly not supported on Windows 7 - but it's working, so there!).

I won't name the "other" brand that wouldn't work (actually it worked, but drives would drop offline after 20 to 30 minutes). I chose this one because it used a different controller chip than the first one. What can I say other than it works and that's what I was looking for?

I do not care about performance, so this review should not be interpreted as a commentary on how fast it is compared to anything else.