Syba SD-PEX50055 PCIe SATA-III + USB3.0 controller

[Hervé]

Following up on my experiments with the PCIe x1 Marvell 88SE9123 controller, I tested the Syba SD-PEX50055 card (which has also been mentioned on other forums). It offers 2 x SATA-III ports + 2 x USB3.0 ports on a PCIe 2.0 x4 card. The card is based on the ASMedia ASM1062 SATA-III controller and the Etron EJ168A USB3.0 controller. 
 
The SATA-III controller works OOB in Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks and Yosemite. It just requires power (using a floppy-type connector). By default, it's listed as "Unknown AHCI controller" under SL and as "Generic AHCI controller" in more recent OS X versions such as Mavericks or Yosemite, which can easily be fixed through a little patch of AppleAHCIPort kext. Just insert the card in a supporting PCIe slot (x4, x8 or x16) and attach the disk(s). Perfect for older desktop PCs that do not have a SATA-II/SATA-III/AHCI capable controller and wish to enjoy SATA HDDs or SSDs at PCIe speed and, for SSDs, enable Trim.
 

USB ports only operate as USB2 speed when the card is fitted in a PCIe v1.0 slot. In addition, they are not supported in SL 10.6, only from Lion 10.7.

 

http://www.sybausa.com/index.php?route=product/product&path=64_77_85&product_id=177

WS670:~ admin$ lspci -nn
pcilib: 0000:08:00.0 64-bit device address ignored.
[...]
04:00.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Pericom Semiconductor Unknown device [12d8:2304] (rev 05)
05:01.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Pericom Semiconductor Unknown device [12d8:2304] (rev 05)
05:02.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Pericom Semiconductor Unknown device [12d8:2304] (rev 05)
06:00.0 SATA controller [0106]: ASMedia Technology Inc. ASM1062 Serial ATA Controller [1b21:0612] (rev 01)
07:00.0 USB controller [0c03]: Etron Technology, Inc. EJ168 USB 3.0 Host Controller [1b6f:7023] (rev 01)
[...]
WS670:~ admin$ 

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Although coming on a x4 format, the card is actually PCIe x2 (i.e. limited to 2 x PCIe lanes). Still, I was holding high hopes of being able to gain improved performance at full or near-full SATA-III (600MB/s) speed off my SSD in my ancient PCIe 1.0 workstation. Unfortunately it proved not to be the case. The card only seems to operate at 1 x PCIe lane per SATA port in my PCIe v1.0 x8 slot (operating at x4). BlackMagic speed test gave somehow disappointing results with a read speed of 200MB/s and a write speed of 166MB/s, i.e. it's a little slower reading than the Marvell controller but a little quicker writing.