Possibly faulty PCI-E sata card or just incorrect configuration?

[disknukem]

Long term watcher and lurker on these forums I should have created an account earlier but ive ran into a rather odd issue that i would like to call upon communities collective expertise on.

I'm building a small system in my work for the erasure of hard disks using an asus z77 sabertooth board paired with an I7-3770 and 32gb or ddr3. The motherboard itself has 8 on board sata ports to of which uses an Asmedia ASM-106x controller all of these function fine but i have run into issues adding additional ports with an add in pci-e card.

The card is a generic pci-e 6 sata port asmedia ASM-106x card (PCE6SAT-M01 VER006S) that a member of the office ordered for me as a cheap test part to see if my plan would work. The issue i am having is that i cant get all 6 ports to function at the same time. The most i am able to get to work on the card is 4 ports working simultaneously, I have tested all ports and they will all function when a single drive is connected but as i start to add drives to the card it will max out at only 4 ports in operation and depending on the order i connect the drives either through hot plugging or through shutdown and connecting the ports that work and those that dont can vary... for example if i hot plug the ports in order 1/2/3/4/5/6 ports 5 and 6 wont function but if i fill 5 and 6 first they will function but another 2 ports will then not function. I have ACHI enabled in the motherboard bios and the card appears in device manager correctly and as far as i can see or know other than that it should just function but for the life of me i cant think of anything else. I have taken the card home this weekend to try on my own system but i am experiencing the exact same issues it also. So do i have a faulty card an incorrectly configured system or has the office just bought a cheap card that will never support more than 4 drives despite having 6 ports...

Anyway now on to the fun part the pictures.

Its hacky at the momment im kind of at the proof of concept stage but the plan is to have 6x 8port pci-e stata or sas cards installed so i can wipe multiple drives at one go, the six port card i have at the momment is really just a step long the road to the final set up. As you can see I'm resusing the front a of a couple of server storage units to use the caddies for mounting.






This is the additonal power supply i have modified to through ALOT of soldering to power the hard drives since its a bit of a frankenstiens monster i jokingly call it SATAn.



This is a picture of the card running in my home system all 6 ports are connected to powered drives but i only have for leds active and drive management can only see the four drives on the active ports.



Any ideas or suggestions are very much welcome I want to apollogise again for my first post hear being a plee for help, Thank you in advance :)