Vantec SATA Host PCI CardItem#: V13-8002  |  Model#: UGT-ST200

Obscure driver cd

As others have commented, the driver cd does not allow XP to automatically find the right drivers. No big deal, just browse until you find the right drivers for your op system. When installed, it has worked fine. This is the only reason I degraded the quality.

Good product

I wanted to replace 7 years old 40GB IDE drive with 160GB SATA for Windows XP SP3 PC. I bought Seagate SATA drive with this controller. With Seagate DiscWizard, it copied whole drive without any problems. I just put in controller and connected SATA drive and boot. Windows XP detected this controller first, then new SATA drive. I left alone with SATA drive. After that I run DiscWizard, and it rebooted and started disk copy. After DiscWizard finished copying, it asked me to disconnect or change booting priority, and I shut it down. Then I disconnected and removed old IDE drive, then booted without any problems. Windows XP did not complain new drive. I thought it would go through Windows XP activation process since hardware changes, but it did not. Whole process was less than 30 minutes, and I was just surprised and happy.

works with Windows 7

I had this card installed on the last unused PCI port on the motherboard and the BIOS didn't recognize it. After I swapped it with the sound card it was recognized. A bit of a hassle, I had to reinstall sound card drivers and for this card I had to contact Vantec support for having the correct drivers for Windows 7. I connected the card to a blu-ray internal drive and everything works fine now.

Opensolaris

Worked with open solaris out of the box. The PC had a bios from 2002 so it had no options for SATA. I set the boot from other device flag in the bios and it worked. Only wish it had 2 internal connectors instead of 1 internal and 1 external.

Works

Works fine with Windows 7, update has the drivers Not so great with XP at least the hot swap part but it works as far as adding SATA

Good for certain uses

This card installed well except for the drivers. Once I found the drivers (not an automatic process), it worked great. I just had to make more effort than I think I should have had to do to find the right drivers on the disk. I would not recommend using it for the boot disk but it is excellent for adding an extra internal SATA drive to an older machine.

Tricky card to work with

This card would absolutely refuse to boot from a SATA DVD drive attached, if there was a bootable DVD inserted. It would boot from bootable CD just fine. Upgraded firmware to the latest, and now it boots from DVD, but only if attached to external port. It will only boot from HDD if attached to internal port. Vendor support is F- rated.

PC does not boot

My older PC would not boot with this card if a SATA DVD drive was connected to it. If I hot swapped the drive after boot up, all was good. Unfortunately I could not get around it and had to return it. The older MB was a IDE only ASUS A7V8K.

Works as advertised

Previous reviews have covered this card well. It works fine and is easy to set up. I don't need the external port so that isn't an issue.

SATA Card

For anyone looking for a simple SATA host PCI Card, this may be the one for you. This card does not have all the bells and whistles that other cards may have, but it does perform. I used this card to hook up my 1TB WD SATA hard drive in my CPU operating on Win XP SP 3. My only issue was loading the drivers. The CD that came with the card, i had no success with getting it to work. But after i went to the manufacturer's website, downloaded the driver for XP, stored it on a disk, extracted the file in my boot files, i finally got Win XP to recognize the HD. Every since then i have never looked back. Everything seems to be working well, and the card is operating as expected. For the money this is a no frills SATA host PCI card. If you have knowledge about loading drivers and working with hardware, get this card. If not, you may want to choose another card that do not need as much attention when trying to get it to work.