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IOgear 2 Port eSATA RAID Controller GICE702S3R5 Hard Drive & RAID Controllers
This review is from : Iogear RAID5 eSATA 3Gbps External 2-port PCI-Express Card
Crashes the Mac Pro . The card doesn't come with Mac drivers and I contacted support to see if they had a solution. The support team was very responsive and provided me with a third party driver. I think this is the core of the issue. Once the driver was installed, everything seemed to work fine, until the Mac Pro got its first few kernel panics ever.
I thought a couple of them were flukes until I deduced that it only happened when a connected hard drive needed to spin up or be mounted/dismounted.
I'm sure the card works perfectly for PCs but I can't recommend it if it can potentially damage my Mac. I am giving it 3 stars since support was responsive, but I am returning the product and restarting the search for a working solution.
Crashes the Mac Pro . The card doesn't come with Mac drivers and I contacted support to see if they had a solution. The support team was very responsive and provided me with a third party driver. I think this is the core of the issue. Once the driver was installed, everything seemed to work fine, until the Mac Pro got its first few kernel panics ever.
I thought a couple of them were flukes until I deduced that it only happened when a connected hard drive needed to spin up or be mounted/dismounted.
I'm sure the card works perfectly for PCs but I can't recommend it if it can potentially damage my Mac. I am giving it 3 stars since support was responsive, but I am returning the product and restarting the search for a working solution.
Iogear RAID5 eSATA 3Gbps External 2-port PCI-Express Card Reviews
PCI-EXPRESS Esata Card - Great Card !!!! . I have been using this product for a long time and needed to buy about 6 more for our servers. I noticed the price on Amazon was unbeatable and thus bought them here.
We use these cards in our HP Proliant servers with Thermaltake ESATA Docks. (Example: Thermaltake BlacX eSATA Hard Drive USB Docking Station. The servers and Windows 2003/2008 Server have no problem detecting and or working with these cards. The thermaltake docks work perfectly with them also.
The docks are usually holding 1tb drives that are used for disk based backup of file servers, exchange 2007 servers, and other types of files. Backup programs have no problem detecting devices attached to these cards as removable storage and thus these score 100 in my book.
REMEMBER...it is not a PCI card...it is a PCI Express card - and the picture shows it very clearly. I cannot speak in regard to the RAID5 as I have not used it for that purpose just yet.
The card comes with two brackets...the one that is on the card in the picture and a half height one to install into smaller machines. We always have to use the half height bracket for our HP servers.
Excellent product.
5/5
PCI-EXPRESS Esata Card - Great Card !!!! . I have been using this product for a long time and needed to buy about 6 more for our servers. I noticed the price on Amazon was unbeatable and thus bought them here.
We use these cards in our HP Proliant servers with Thermaltake ESATA Docks. (Example: Thermaltake BlacX eSATA Hard Drive USB Docking Station. The servers and Windows 2003/2008 Server have no problem detecting and or working with these cards. The thermaltake docks work perfectly with them also.
The docks are usually holding 1tb drives that are used for disk based backup of file servers, exchange 2007 servers, and other types of files. Backup programs have no problem detecting devices attached to these cards as removable storage and thus these score 100 in my book.
REMEMBER...it is not a PCI card...it is a PCI Express card - and the picture shows it very clearly. I cannot speak in regard to the RAID5 as I have not used it for that purpose just yet.
The card comes with two brackets...the one that is on the card in the picture and a half height one to install into smaller machines. We always have to use the half height bracket for our HP servers.
Excellent product.
5/5
Iogear RAID5 eSATA 3Gbps External 2-port PCI-Express Card Opinions
Great product reasonable price worked out of the box... . After reading some of the reviews on this product, I was just a little concerned. But, I have purchased other IOGear products in the past and all functioned without a single flaw. So I bought the card and installed it the same day it arrived. My Dell GX280 immediately saw the card, installed it and the card connected to my LaCie Quad d2 external hard drive. Within 5 minutes I was creating a backup of the system. It has continued to function flawlessly throughout the last month. I would highly recommend this eSATA card.
Great product reasonable price worked out of the box... . After reading some of the reviews on this product, I was just a little concerned. But, I have purchased other IOGear products in the past and all functioned without a single flaw. So I bought the card and installed it the same day it arrived. My Dell GX280 immediately saw the card, installed it and the card connected to my LaCie Quad d2 external hard drive. Within 5 minutes I was creating a backup of the system. It has continued to function flawlessly throughout the last month. I would highly recommend this eSATA card.
Flexible solution for adding eSATA drives to your system . I purchased the unit early March 2009 and have been using it daily. During system start-up (Dell 720 running Vista Ultimate), I set my bios to turn off RAID so the drives are not linked in any way. I have been using this card for months with two eSATA devices: a Thermaltake BlacX eSATA USB Docking Station which is hot swappable (3 GB/sec throughput) and a Western Digital WDH2Q20000N 2TB My Book Studio Edition II Hard Drive with Quad Interface (FW400/FW800, USB 2.0 & eSATA). The WD Studio is a dual drive unit configured in RAID 0 (performs as one 2 TB disk). The setup allows me the ability to use the WD Studio II drive as a primary drive for ripping home DVI format movies using Adobe Premier and then backing up files with multiple Western Digital Caviar Green 1 TB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 3.5 Inch, 32 MB Cache, SATA II WD10EADS drives which can be had for $75-85 per using the Thermaltake dock. A pair of the OEM 1 TB WD drives can be easily stored in a Case Logic HDC-1 Medium EVA External Hard Drive Case (Black) (~$18). Obviously, these drives must be handled with some degree of care since they are intended to be used as internal drives. I recently added a eSATA 5 port multiplier from Coolgear [...] for $100 which allows me to connect another Thermaltake BlacX dock (up to 5 total eSATA devices simultaneously). This eSATA card supports port multipliers (as listed in the technical specs). I have not observed any read/write speed degradation with the Coolgear port multiplier which has some advanced circuitry and chips (Whoo Hoo!). This arrangement makes for very flexible and speedy data storage/back-up system. I keep a copy of my most important files on drives stored in Case Logic cases placed in a locked cabinet (under Pendaflex folders) at work as a hedge against a catastrophic event (fire/flood/theft) which could render most home user data back-up schemes ineffective. Each of the components I have mentioned in this review are excellent. No system freezes or drive accessibility issues so far. Let's see what Windows 7 brings...
UPDATE 01-18-2011: Hardware continues to work smoothly under Windows 7 (32-Bit). I purchased a USB 3.0 PCIe card (Buffalo Superspeed) and compared the performance of WD Drives (2.5" 1TB USB 3.0 enclosure and 3.5" 1TB SATA II drive in a Thermaltake dock). eSATA was about 50% faster than USB 3.0. I suspect that USB 3.0 will at some point surpass eSATA as motherboards, OS drivers and hard disks are optimized for USB 3 but for anyone looking to update their rig with current PCIe cards will most likely be better served with eSATA drives.
UPDATE 01-18-2011: Hardware continues to work smoothly under Windows 7 (32-Bit). I purchased a USB 3.0 PCIe card (Buffalo Superspeed) and compared the performance of WD Drives (2.5" 1TB USB 3.0 enclosure and 3.5" 1TB SATA II drive in a Thermaltake dock). eSATA was about 50% faster than USB 3.0. I suspect that USB 3.0 will at some point surpass eSATA as motherboards, OS drivers and hard disks are optimized for USB 3 but for anyone looking to update their rig with current PCIe cards will most likely be better served with eSATA drives.
So far so good . I installed this IOGear RAID5 eSATA card a month ago. The operating system (XP) recognized it immediately. I run it as RAID 1 (two 1TB LaCie mirrored drives)and have no problems. The controller has been dependable and performed well. I also like that IOGear provides support, literature and driver updates on their website. Some manufacturers don't.
A word of caution. Please remember that in any RAID configuration, the RAID controller (this card) is a weak link. If the controller fails, it can scramble data on all of the RAID drives at the same time. RAID can protect against hard drive failures only... not controller failure. So, if you use this, or any RAID controller, make sure to also backup to a non-RAID drive regularly.
A word of caution. Please remember that in any RAID configuration, the RAID controller (this card) is a weak link. If the controller fails, it can scramble data on all of the RAID drives at the same time. RAID can protect against hard drive failures only... not controller failure. So, if you use this, or any RAID controller, make sure to also backup to a non-RAID drive regularly.
Works as advertised . I needed an eSATA card that worked with an external chassis with a port-multiplier. JMicron chipset cards do not work and their tech support won't return my calls or e-mails so I purchased this Silicon Image 3132 based card. It worked perfectly out of the box. The only "problem" with it is that it shipped with an ancient BIOS image on it. Windows 7 allows easy access to upgrading the BIOS which is on Silicon Image's website. It is now installed and working perfectly.
Works as expected . If you need external ports, go ahead, throughput is independent of on-board SATA.
No problem with drivers.
No problem with drivers.
Cons Review
Drivers software didn't work . I hate to slam this card, because it seems to be a great card, once working. However, I was unable to get the drivers to function and had to return the card.
I bought it intenting to use it with one external hard drive, not as a RAID card, but the description said it could be used with any external HDD with the appropriate drivers.
I installed the card - easy, and plugged in the HDD (Western Digital My Book 1TB) with 3ft eSATA cable. I popped in the driver CD from the box, and was expecting the autorun to pop up a menu that would allow me to copy the drivers to my computer. Instead a screen came up asking me if I wanted to copy the files on the disk to a CD. This was not what I was expecting, and was not the menu that always pops up with these installation CDs. I had to exit out of the screen, and copy the files to my computer using Windows Explorer.
I did manage to install the driver set and got the card working - or so I thought. I copied some .jpg pictures to the HDD and it was VERY FAST compared with my previous firewire connection.
However, my backup software didn't recognize the HDD. I checked with Device Manager and the driver had a yellow box with ! before it, so this meant that the driver wasn't working properly. So, I tried to do the install again, by deleting the driver and reinstalling. This is where the whole procedure came to a halt.
There was NO manual included in the box, but there was a quick installation guide. This proved to be useless. I followed the directions on the guide and tried to use Add New Hardware function of Windows XP to install the drivers, but this operation failed.
I went to the Iogear web site and downloaded the manual. It said to install the Setup GUI. I found this in the files that I had copied to my computer, but the GUI wouldn't install. At this point I was getting concerned that the software was very buggy.
In liew of the GUI there is a DOS based setup screen that can be accessed to setup the card. You reboot the computer with the HDD attached and a screen appears, whereupon you enter CTL-S or F4 and get to the setup. Most of the attempts to get to this setup program failed, but I was able to get to this program eventually after several tries.
In the manual it said that to use one HDD set this setup program to Concetate. I did, but nothing happened. I tried every possible combination of setups and nothing worked.
None of the RAID settings worked. There was no manual on the Iogear web site to explain how to use this setup program - nothing. So, I was guessing. I tried everything, with no success. I have used BIOS setup programs before and they always worked. With this program I couldn't figure out how to save the settings and make them work. 100% failure and frustration. I tried everything.
To be fair to the people at Iogear I did not call their customer support line. After staying up until 3:30 in the morning, I had reached my limit of frustration, so I pulled out the card, re-attached the firewire cable to my firewire port, and the HDD was working fine again.
Today I returned the Iogear card. I bought it at Frys. After returning the card, I went to the shelf with the eSATA cards and noticed that all similar Iogear cards were returns - about 6 cards. So, apparently, I wasn't the only one who had been frustrated with this card.
I suspect that an experienced IT tech who had previous experience with installing RAID drive systems would have fared better, but I had no previous experience with RAID, so perhaps this was the wrong card for me and my Dell Inspiron running XP. Perhaps I should have purchased the non-RAID card.
What frustrated me was that I can't really tell if this card is good or not, because the setup software was so horrible. I have many years of experience setting up computers, but I am not a professional. This was the very first time that I failed to get something set up and had to return the product.
So, my suggestion to the Iogear company would be to fix your drivers and your printed material so ordinary folks can get your product to work.
And, I would suggest to anyone who isn't an IT professional with RAID experience to get another card - a non-RAID card.
As I said previously, this might be a great card, but I wasn't able to get it to work, so I can't say. I will say that the setup software is simply and utterly unacceptable.
Followup May 12, 2009: I sent for another eSATA card from Amazon.com. I installed it this evening, and had the same result as with the Iogear card - install was easy, but computer didn't "see" the external drive. This time the driver installation was much easier than with the Iogear installation. I put the installation disk in the CD drive and XP found the drivers quickly and installed them. But, the result was the same - the drivers (different set than Iogear) didn't work with XP.
So, I removed the card, hooked up my Firewire 400 cable to the external drive, rebooted, and I'm back in business.
Conclusion: eSATA drivers not talking to XP properly. No problems with USB, or Firewire. I'll just stick with what works for now. I'll be searching the net for info on this problem. Good luck to you if you can get eSATA to work for you - I couldn't.
I bought it intenting to use it with one external hard drive, not as a RAID card, but the description said it could be used with any external HDD with the appropriate drivers.
I installed the card - easy, and plugged in the HDD (Western Digital My Book 1TB) with 3ft eSATA cable. I popped in the driver CD from the box, and was expecting the autorun to pop up a menu that would allow me to copy the drivers to my computer. Instead a screen came up asking me if I wanted to copy the files on the disk to a CD. This was not what I was expecting, and was not the menu that always pops up with these installation CDs. I had to exit out of the screen, and copy the files to my computer using Windows Explorer.
I did manage to install the driver set and got the card working - or so I thought. I copied some .jpg pictures to the HDD and it was VERY FAST compared with my previous firewire connection.
However, my backup software didn't recognize the HDD. I checked with Device Manager and the driver had a yellow box with ! before it, so this meant that the driver wasn't working properly. So, I tried to do the install again, by deleting the driver and reinstalling. This is where the whole procedure came to a halt.
There was NO manual included in the box, but there was a quick installation guide. This proved to be useless. I followed the directions on the guide and tried to use Add New Hardware function of Windows XP to install the drivers, but this operation failed.
I went to the Iogear web site and downloaded the manual. It said to install the Setup GUI. I found this in the files that I had copied to my computer, but the GUI wouldn't install. At this point I was getting concerned that the software was very buggy.
In liew of the GUI there is a DOS based setup screen that can be accessed to setup the card. You reboot the computer with the HDD attached and a screen appears, whereupon you enter CTL-S or F4 and get to the setup. Most of the attempts to get to this setup program failed, but I was able to get to this program eventually after several tries.
In the manual it said that to use one HDD set this setup program to Concetate. I did, but nothing happened. I tried every possible combination of setups and nothing worked.
None of the RAID settings worked. There was no manual on the Iogear web site to explain how to use this setup program - nothing. So, I was guessing. I tried everything, with no success. I have used BIOS setup programs before and they always worked. With this program I couldn't figure out how to save the settings and make them work. 100% failure and frustration. I tried everything.
To be fair to the people at Iogear I did not call their customer support line. After staying up until 3:30 in the morning, I had reached my limit of frustration, so I pulled out the card, re-attached the firewire cable to my firewire port, and the HDD was working fine again.
Today I returned the Iogear card. I bought it at Frys. After returning the card, I went to the shelf with the eSATA cards and noticed that all similar Iogear cards were returns - about 6 cards. So, apparently, I wasn't the only one who had been frustrated with this card.
I suspect that an experienced IT tech who had previous experience with installing RAID drive systems would have fared better, but I had no previous experience with RAID, so perhaps this was the wrong card for me and my Dell Inspiron running XP. Perhaps I should have purchased the non-RAID card.
What frustrated me was that I can't really tell if this card is good or not, because the setup software was so horrible. I have many years of experience setting up computers, but I am not a professional. This was the very first time that I failed to get something set up and had to return the product.
So, my suggestion to the Iogear company would be to fix your drivers and your printed material so ordinary folks can get your product to work.
And, I would suggest to anyone who isn't an IT professional with RAID experience to get another card - a non-RAID card.
As I said previously, this might be a great card, but I wasn't able to get it to work, so I can't say. I will say that the setup software is simply and utterly unacceptable.
Followup May 12, 2009: I sent for another eSATA card from Amazon.com. I installed it this evening, and had the same result as with the Iogear card - install was easy, but computer didn't "see" the external drive. This time the driver installation was much easier than with the Iogear installation. I put the installation disk in the CD drive and XP found the drivers quickly and installed them. But, the result was the same - the drivers (different set than Iogear) didn't work with XP.
So, I removed the card, hooked up my Firewire 400 cable to the external drive, rebooted, and I'm back in business.
Conclusion: eSATA drivers not talking to XP properly. No problems with USB, or Firewire. I'll just stick with what works for now. I'll be searching the net for info on this problem. Good luck to you if you can get eSATA to work for you - I couldn't.
Probably Works But... . I concur with Tom's 5/5/2009 review. I wish I had read it before I ordered this card. In my case the drivers appeared to install but I still couldn't get it to work. Knowing what I know now, I would have gone to Iogears Web site and looked at the manual first. That gives you a much better idea of what you're in for when you install this card.
Not supported for Mac . I always read reviews prior to any purchase. I always make certain to read the negative reviews and often (with technical items) dismiss some as sometimes being an issue with that particular user, their setup, etc, but not with the product itself. Besides it's not really possible for a ton of 5 star and 1 star reviews on a product unless there are horrible quality control issues.
Well with this card, I can confirm, this is NOT, I REPEAT NOT, a card for Mac users. I read quite a bit on the differences in the SiI chips and drivers. I also spent quite sometime with technical support at IOGear to get this to function. Ultimately, the card can be recognized by your Mac (which is where IOGear support leaves off). However plugging in drives and transferring data resulted in kernel panic after kernel panic. This is a production Mac Pro that has been in operation for more than a year without any issues (hardware) what-so-ever.
This may be a good card for non-Mac users and although the Amazon listing says it does not include Mac drivers, that is not accurate. IOGear suppliers OSX drivers on their media and also have support listings that direct to online resources to download drivers also. I agree with others, the support engineer was very cooperative and did work with me, however I don't think they product is developed with Mac users in mind.
Well with this card, I can confirm, this is NOT, I REPEAT NOT, a card for Mac users. I read quite a bit on the differences in the SiI chips and drivers. I also spent quite sometime with technical support at IOGear to get this to function. Ultimately, the card can be recognized by your Mac (which is where IOGear support leaves off). However plugging in drives and transferring data resulted in kernel panic after kernel panic. This is a production Mac Pro that has been in operation for more than a year without any issues (hardware) what-so-ever.
This may be a good card for non-Mac users and although the Amazon listing says it does not include Mac drivers, that is not accurate. IOGear suppliers OSX drivers on their media and also have support listings that direct to online resources to download drivers also. I agree with others, the support engineer was very cooperative and did work with me, however I don't think they product is developed with Mac users in mind.
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Product Details
EAN : 0881317008947UPC : 881317008947
MPN : GICE702S3R5
Brand : Iogear
Weight : 1 pounds
Height : 2 inches
Length : 8 inches
Width : 6 inches
Binding : Personal Computers
Department : Computer
Format : CD
Hardware Platform : Pc
Manufacturer : IOGEAR
Model : GICE702S3R5
Operating System : Windows
Platform : Windows 2003 Server
Publisher : IOGEAR
SKU : DHGICE702S3R5
Studio : IOGEAR
Where To Buy
You can buy Iogear RAID5 eSATA 3Gbps External 2-port PCI-Express Card on Amazon . Click here to Read More
