Ableconn PEX-SA156 6-Port SATA 6G PCI Express x4 Host Adapter Card (ASMedia ASM1166 Controller)

The card works perfectly right out of the box and plugged into my Windows 10 machine. No setup issues, driver problems or conflicts with another SATA expansion card I have installed. Couldn’t be happier.

I went to college for both Computer Engineering and Computer Science. I am pretty computer literate, and this was the best add-in Non-Raid PCIe Sata Card I could find.It uses one of the only two chipsets that I could find on Amazon (at the current time) that supports the PCIe 3.0 standard that gives up to double the bandwidth of the previous PCIe 2.0 standard. This card uses the ASMedia ASM1166 chipset. The other chipset I found that supports PCIe 3.0 is the Zhiwei JMB585 chipset. Most add-in Sata port cards, that you can find, are usually PCIe 2.0 and only work at half the bandwidth of the new PCIe 3.0 standard. It also runs on an x4 slot, as compared to other options that run on a slow x1 slot.It also has 6 sata ports, supports hot swapping and port multiplier (allows you to connect an external drive bay with multiple drives to one single sata port). You can hypothetically connect up to 30 drives to this card. I have not tried this myself and not sure how well it works. I was going to go with a multi-drive external bay, but the power supply on these external bays do not support multiple high power draw 3.5 in drives. They usually only support multiple 2.5 in drives that require a lot less power.Now the operating system you use is irrelevant in regards to booting up. The boot process is usually initialized by the bios. I had the exact opposite experience of a previous reviewer with regards to booting up the system. I recently upgraded to a mid-range computer system using a Gigabyte B450 Aorus Pro Wi-Fi Motherboard. This is a recent motherboard that was still being sold this last Christmas on Amazon. It has the lastest BIOS version. Despite this, it would not boot to any drive when running it in UEFI mode. I had to use an internal motherboard sata port to boot the system when running this add-in card in UEFI mode. But once I switched to legacy support on the BIOS, it would allow me to boot to any drive connected to any port on this add-in card, including hard drives, blu-ray drives and dvd-rom drives. When running this card in UEFI mode, no drives connected would appear in the BIOS screen, and you would not be able to select any as a boot drive.I been using up to all 6 ports on this card, because I have a lot of hard drives, and it's been very stable and working fine for almost 2 months (I purchased this card in February 2021). I do recommend this card, but you may want to experiment with running it in both legacy and UEFI mode, and seeing which works best on your motherboard.

Created a NAS with 7x 12tb WD Red's, with leftover parts on a Gigabyte X570 Aorus Master, this product was plug and play.No software, no drivers, no cd's needed.

Does what I want it to do.

Installed on a PCIE2 x8 slot of a GA-EX58-UD5 motherboard (circa 2010) with updated bios version f13u, running Windows 7. The card was recognized immediately by the OS. Data drives connected to the card were recognized as well and performed as expected. However the system could not boot from any boot drive connected to this card (tried a SATA SSD drive and then a SATA hard drive). The issue seems to be with the old motherboard legacy bios (non UEFI). The reason for the 4 star rating is the claim: "PCIe x4 Lanes board. Support both UEFI and Legacy Boot ROM. Work with UEFI or Legacy motherboards". Apparently there may be cases where this card won't support a boot drive on old legacy systems. It is still a very good solution to add SATA3 (6GBps) support for data drives on old systems.