Pcie sata add-on card issues

[Pendragoon]

Hello community! I have a Z400 that I’m trying to put back in to service and installed an SSD for a boot drive. After install I realized these workstations top out at 250-300 mb/s due to them not having any sata 3.0 ports. So I bought the sata add on card below to try and get full speed out of my SSD but am having an issue getting this card to work properly in this machine.

https://www.newegg.com/syba-model-si-pex40148-pci-express-to-sata-card/p/14G-009S-00017

The issue I am having is the bios doesn’t always detect the card. Cold boot is the only way the bios sees it......if I restart the computer from within windows 10 it no longer sees the card and can’t boot. I then have to cycle the power to get it detected again.

I am running the latest bios for this machine and can’t seem to figure this out. Is there a setting somewhere in the bios I’m missing to get this to work properly? Does this sound like a bios issue (a conflict with the onboard controller and the addon card controller) or an issue with the card itself? Any help would be great! Thanks 🙂

[Pendragoon]

Sorry to double post but maybe I should ask (if no one knows what’s going on with the issue I’m having)  if anyone can recommend a sub $20 sata card that is known to work out of the box to get sata 6gb/s on this machine?

help would be greatly appreciated, thanks

[Pendragoon]

Why on earth was my post moved to  “HP ZCentral Remote Boost and Connect”?

Anyways...the issue is still there. I tried it on another computer with uefi and it works as it’s supposed to. I’m going to try it on another system with a classic bios on it. My guess is the card requires uefi but it’s not stated anywhere that being a requirement....

I emailed io-crest/syba tech support about this but they just asked when I bought the card and then stopped responding....I haven’t even had it 30 days so I don’t know what that’s about but I  guess I either use it in another system or return it 

[DGroves]

first of all let's go over some necessary information you need to be aware of

1. adding a  x1  PCI-e SATA 3.0 card to a PCI-E 2.0 based system will not really give you sata 6Bps speeds, this is due to the limitation of the speed of the pci-e 2.0 bus

2. the more devices you add to a pci-e SATA card the slower it will run as each device is connected through the pci-e bus which is v2.0 in your case

if you want faster I/O you have several options, none of which are 20.00 price wise

1 use a marvell 9230 based sata pci-e card that has a x2 connection (twice the bandwidth) this card will provide true sata 6GBps speeds for a single drive if you use more than one  connected to this card, then again all data speeds will be slower

https://www.amazon.com/Marvell-88SE9230-Expansion-Controller-Converter/dp/B08DFDJ9PW

https://www.newegg.com/p/17Z-00PS-00004

2. use a cheap LSI 9211 card flashed with "IT" firmware which makes this a 8 port sata 6GBps card

https://www.ebay.com/itm/313368376476?epid=134224756&hash=item48f635f49c:g:mJwAAOSwfsReKkNp

last, cheap sub 20 sata cards are just that CHEAP in all aspects, performance/reliability/support you get what you pay for,

both solutions i list are mid range solutions with proven performance and solid driver support