Io Crest 8-port Sata Iii Pcie 2.0 X2 Controller Card Green, Si-pex40071 - 4 Ports Not Working

Hi,

I just upgraded from Windows XP x64 to Windows 10.
I have a GIGABYTE GA-EP45-DQ6 motherboard.

When I had Windows XP x64 running, I was using a HighPoint RocketRAID 2320 PCI Express (x8 non-RAID) x4 SATA II RAID Card RAID 0/1/5/10/50 JBOD. I had 8 hard drives connected to it and all 8 ports on the adapter card worked fine.

Because I was upgrading to Windows 10, I bought an IO Crest 8-port SATA III PCIe 2.0 x2 Controller Card Green, SI-PEX40071 https://www.amazon.com/IO-Crest-8-p...444&sr=1-1&ref_=nav_ya_signin&_encoding=UTF8&

Only 4 of the 8 ports are working on the adapter card.

I'm not sure if the adapter card is defective or if only 4 of the 8 ports can work with my motherboard for some reason.

Does anybody have any ideas?

 

The motherboard should not care how many USB ports are used, as long as the connected devices don't present too great a load.

I note that PCIe x1 slots are limited to 10W total load. That said, these are internal drives so only data should be going through the card. If they were external drives, they would need to be self-powered.

Have you tested the 4 bad ports individually with just one drive connected? Or if you connect 4 drives and they work, move those 4 drives to the other 4 ports. Do they work now?

One thing I notice that I find odd is on that Amazon page, it says, "We recommend a fresh Windows install with this card". I don't understand why.

 

Hi Digerati. Thanks for responding.

Have you tested the 4 bad ports individually with just one drive connected? Or if you connect 4 drives and they work, move those 4 drives to the other 4 ports. Do they work now?

Yes, I have but no drive works when connected to the 4 left-hand side ports. They only work in the 4 right-hand side ports. I have a total of 12 internal hard drives. When I connect any of them to the 4 left-hand side ports, they don't work even if no hard drives are connected to the 4 right-hand side ports.


I bought a new video card along with the new adapter card so that I could install Windows 10. I removed the old ones, installed the new ones, and installed Windows 10. I don't understand why they recommend a fresh install of Windows but it's what I did.

I'm going to RMA the card and get another one. Hopefully, it'll work fine. If not, then I'll have to assume that the problem lies with the card, that maybe they're all defective or that they're not fully compatible with my motherboard, and I have to buy a different one.

 

Then the card is faulty.

 

I did an RMA on the card and the new card is doing the same thing. It looks like it either may not be compatible with my motherboard or a large percentage of them are faulty. I'll have to buy a different one. Can someone recommend one that may work with my motherboard (GIGABYTE GA-EP45-DQ6 (Award Bios v F13a)) and Windows 10?

 

That is really odd. I don't understand why since the USB standard requires supporting 127 devices per controller. So 8 should be a drop in the bucket. Do you have another computer you can try it with?

 

No, I don't. The reviews on the page mention the same problem. Because of several problems that I was having, I had my pc checked out at a pc repair shop in town. They couldn't get the 4 left-hand side ports working on the controller card either.

https://www.amazon.com/IO-Crest-8-port-Controller-SI-PEX40071/dp/B00ESFEI2E/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1537323444&sr=1-1&keywords=IO+Crest+8-port+SATA+III+PCIe+2.0+x2+Controller+Card+Green,+SI-PEX40071

I didn't have a problem with my last controller card running under XP x64.

 

Well, I would pick a different brand and perhaps go with 2 cards with 4 ports each. Sorry I don't have any experience to offer any suggestions.

 

Maybe someone else can give me advice. I'm clearly not good at picking a good one either.

 

Does it have to be 8-ports in a single card? Or do you have room for 2 x 4-port cards? It seems you have a lot more options if you can use 4-port cards.

Hmmm, I found that same card on Newegg. It seems Matthew D had the same problem but got it sorted with this procedure.

I note in the manufacturer's comments to a complaint further down from Matthew's, they recommended uninstalling the card's drivers, rebooting and just letting Windows use it own native drivers - as worked for Matthew.

 

"don't bother with the little mini disc thing."
I didn't either. There must be at least 30 drivers on the disk and no instructions are given as to which driver should be installed. I bought the controller card at Amazon and someone there said not to install any of the drivers.


"I did this while the system was booted (i'm lucky my board supported SATA plug in play.)"
I don't have plug in play. I have to connect the hard drives when my pc is turned off, then boot up.

"you MUST start at CN2 SATA4 and work your way to CN5. Fill CN2, then CN1, then CN4, then CN5."

There is CN2 SATA4 and SATA3 and CN1 SATA 2 and SATA1. The bottom row in the picture in the manual are CON1 and CON2 ESATA 1, 2, 3 and 4. There's no CN3, CN4 or CN5 in the manual.

So if I'm understanding the directions that you quoted from NewEgg, I should connect a hard drive to the bottom right hand port first, which is CN2 SATA4, boot up, shut down. Then connect a hard drive to CN2, SATA3, boot up, shut down. Then connect a hard drive to CN1 SATA2, boot up, shut down. Then connect a hard to to CN1 SATA1, boot up, shut down. Then where should I connect the next hard drive since there's no CN3, CN4 or CN5 on the picture in the manual?

 

Sorry, but your guess is as good as mine. I think this boils down to how important getting this working is (and how bull-headed you are ) and if you are willing to just try different setups and see what happens. Me? I'm a hardware guy but I think I would have given up some time ago.

 

There are way to many different setups that can be tried and none guarantee success. I need an 8-port card to work because I have 12 internal hard drives and not enough ports on my motherboard to handle them all. If there are no other 8-port adapter cards on the market, I'm stuck, unless I remove a card that I use for external hard drives and insert a 4-port card in that slot and a 4-port card in the pci-e slot. I'll probably go that route.

I'm just surprised that this is the only 8-port pci-e card on the market that I can use.

Thanks for your help. I appreciate it very much.

 

Most users just don't have a need for that many ports or drives. If they do, they get a motherboard with more SATA ports. Many support directly 6 or more SATA devices. Maybe you need to look at spreading your resources out to more than one computer. If, for example, Mother Nature decides to zap, flood, or blow way that computer, it could be a bad day for you.

 

When the motherboard fails, which I know it will eventually do, I'll look into replacing it and the other hardware. Until then, all I need is an 8-port adapter card. I use all the hard drives on a daily basis. Since there are no other 8-port adapter cards on the market, I'll have to get 2 4-port ones. I've located them for $18 each versus what a new motherboard and other hardware would cost. They're pci, not pci-e but I have 2 pci ports on my motherboard. I'll just have to remove a card that I have in one of them. I don't use the external ports that they provide anyway.
https://www.amazon.com/Semlos-Internal-Controller-Sil3114-Chipset/dp/B00L2X6DE6

 

You are lucky you have two PCI slots. Many motherboards aren't coming with any anymore.

There are several 4-port PCIe cards. But how about a 10-port card!

 

That card looks great. My drives are JBOD so I don't need to be concerned about setting up an array, and my hard drives are 1Tb and 2Tb so I don't have to be concerned about it not recognizing larger drives as some people mentioned in the reviews. I'll give it a shot.

Thanks very much!

 

Fingers crossed! Keep us posted.

 

The estimated delivery date is next Friday, the 16th, but I'll let you know how it goes.

 

Sounds like a plan. Good luck.

 

The card wasn't supposed to come in until next Friday but I got it in the mail today but it's not working right. I don't know what the problem is.

I have 6 Western Digital hard drives that I tried connecting one at a time. Each of them is recognized DURING boot up but my computer won't continue to boot up any further than the screen that tells me that the hard drive is connected to the card. It stops there and won't boot to Windows. I have the card connected to a pci-3 port on my motherboard. Is there something specific I need to do when I connect the hard drives to the card, such as connecting them to certain ports first, or some other thing?

 

I meant to say that I have the card connected to a pci-e port, not a pci-3 port.

 

Wow. Sorry for the bad luck. I have never tried to connect so many drives. Did you verify your boot drive is ahead of the others in your BIOS boot order menu?

 

It's first in boot order, second is my floppy drive and third is the CD ROM drive. As far as Master/Slave, I think BIOS determined that on its own. I never change any settings in BIOS except boot order and enabling USB mouse.

Do you have any idea what Step 3 and Step 4 means in the "manual" that came with the adapter card that I attached in my previous thread?

 

I just went into BIOS and confirmed that Hard Drive is first in boot order, followed by Floppy Disk and then CD ROM Drive, just in case something, somehow got changed, but it didn't. The boot order is the same.

I did notice something unusual in CMOS, though. There's usually a drive allocated for the Master and Slave. Each of them, 0 through 5, is [None]. When I installed Windows 10, I had to change it to AHCI. Could that be the reason that they're all None now?

 

I thought I'd attach a hard drive to the adapter card and go into BIOS to see if it says anything about the adapter card (what do I know?). Anyway, I couldn't get into BIOS when the hard drive was connected to the adapter card. It stopped again at the window where it listed the hard drive that's connected to the adapter card.

So I went into Device Manager. I don't think the adapter card is listed in Device Manager. I attached a screenshot. Shouldn't it be listed even if a hard drive isn't connected to it?

 

Before you gave up did you look in drive management to see if the other 4 drives were there?

 

There is no Master and Slave with SATA drives. That was only with EIDE (PATA) drives because you could put two drives on one data cable. SATA only allows one drive per cable per motherboard SATA connector.

 

I can't get to Windows to get into Disk Management to check. Boot up stops when as soon as it lists the drives that are connected to the adapter card. Only the hard drives that are connected to my motherboard appear in Disk Management.

 

So that part of CMOS is okay then.

Do you have any idea why the adapter card doesn't show up in Device Manager?