I bought this card from Amazon as I had run out of storage space on my Desktop. I had to remove my soundcard but the motherboard onboard audio worked just fine.
Installing the card was relatively simple physically. The trouble came when I tried to get it to recognize the hard drives. I have an Asus M5A78L-M PLUS/USB3 Motherboard. When I installed the QNINE card the BIOS couldn’t recognize any of the hard drives attached via the motherboard. I wondered whether there wasn’t enough power or whether the card was just defective. 2 hours later after pulling hard drives out and plugging them back in again me and my dad managed to boot the computer and we flashed the BIOS of the Silicon Image Sil 3114 SoftRaid 5 Controller Chip to the latest version, 5.5.00, on the QNINE Card.
To flash the BIOS you can go to Device Manager and find the chip name under Storage Controllers. You will have to leave the card plugged into the computer with no drives attached in order to boot to windows.
The BIOS can be found here: https://www.latticesemi.com/Support/ASSPSoftwareArchive
After the hassle of installing the card, it worked perfectly and I can’t fault it.
Adding this card to my system allowed me to add four 2.5″ hard drives 3 of which were 1 TB in capacity and one 2TB drive. I now have a 7TB backup drive, a 5TB drive to store my photos, videos, downloads, and anything else, and I have my two 240GB SSDs with Windows installed. These are set up in a RAID 0 with the motherboard RAID controller. This was intended to make my system drive slightly faster which I think the read and write speeds are but the response time sometimes runs in the thousands of milliseconds.
The card only supports SATA I which has a 1.5GB/s data rate and my motherboard only supports SATA II with double the data rate but is nowhere near the speeds of SATA III or NVMe drives. Hopefully, I’ll upgrade the PC in the future to take advantage of these new technologies.
My backup and media drives don’t use the RAID controller but rather Windows inbuilt option of Windows Storage Spaces. Again, not the fastest but allows me to have large-sized drives for storing my data. These are set up in the equivalent of RAID 0 so that means there is no redundancy, hence the large backup drive.
