LSI Logic Controller Card LSI00301 SAS 9207-8i 8Port Internal SAS/SATA 6Gb/s PCI Express Single Retail

The heatsink was discolored and the plastic container it came in had what appeared to be parts of leaves, and a small part on the pcie connector, but after cleaning it off it works perfect, just runs hot, so i have a fan on it at all times to keep it from overheating

I replaced a basic SATA card with this SAS card because the SATA card was acting flaky. That's what I get for the price.This card has worked well without causing any random HDD errors. Plus, the ports support far more drives than it looks. You can split each of those headers to four or more HDDs using a SAS-SATA cable. I can't speak to data center use, but this will easily connect to more drives than can fit in a home case - even a full tower like I have.I run whatever the current version of Ubuntu Linux is at any given time and it worked out of the box. Zero configuration. UEFI BIOS sees the drives attached through the card, and Linux identified and mounted the partitions using GUID with zero changes after swapping to this card.The only thing this card lacks is RAID, but you really should be using software RAID or another redundancy solution anyway. Hardware RAID is (should be) dead.I highly recommend this card for a home server. It is worth every penny.

This is being used on an old Z170 Intel chipset to add extra SATA ports for a "RAID5" aka Windows 10 Parity storage space for 5, 6TB NAS rated HDDs. Unlike the simple "add SATA port" cards that only relocated the motherboard SATA ports to that card, this actually adds additional SATA ports.In my case, I moved the HDDs from the motherboard to this card. The drives previously used the Intel RAID5 BIOS. That provided a large 512 byte sector drive. However, to add a 2TB M2 drive I needed to use two of the SATA ports, thus the reason for this addition.I used Macrium Reflect to backup all the BIOS drives before the change to an external 20TB USB drive. I then restored the 1TB C boot drive along with the hidden repair partitions to the M2 drive. However, I did run into an issue restoring the large Z 20TB drive, as this new Windows partition used 8k blocks instead of 512. Thankfully Macrium lets you mount the Image as a read only drive, and as this was just used for data, there was no issue for special permissions. I then used Windows copy to copy from that image drive to the new Z drive. After a few days, it completed successfully.After a week it is working flawlessly. For the price it is the best solution I could come up for more SATA ports.

I purchased this card about a year ago for a FreeNAS server I have in my "home office". FreeNAS suggests an "HBA" only card (i.e. a card that does not have built-in RAID). This card is of the HBA type.Initially, my FreeNAS server had 6 x 4TB WD Red NAS drives in a ZFS2 (RAID with 2 parity drives, for 16TB net storage). Unfortunately, I was running out of space and needed to add another two 4TB drives.The motherboard I am using has 8 SATA connectors, so with 1 SSD boot drive and 6x4TB drives, that is 7 total. Needless to say, adding two more drives wasn't possible.Note: If you are familiar with FreeNAS, you know you can boot off a flash drive, but the speed isn't that great and I don't like the reliability of flashdrives for this purpose, so I chose a cheap SSD as a boot drive. MUCH faster on boot! No speed difference in operation. SSDs tend to be more reliable. You can do the cost/benefit analysis for your own needs/risk acceptance.I purchased this card because it was on the FreeNAS compatible list. I backed up my NAS to various external drives I have (FreeNAS didn't/doesn't have the ability to add drives to an existing ZFS RAID array, YET), installed the card, attached all 8 drives to the card, and, voila(!), FreeNAS saw the drives! I created the new ZFS2 array with all 8 drives, copied all ~15TB of data back to the NAS and everything has been working fine ever since.If you have a FreeNAS server, I can say, from my experience, that this card will work well. I cannot say how FAST it is compared to other cards, but it works well for my needs (it can handle a full gigabit network connection at full speed (105-112MB/sec with large file transfers and with ethernet's overhead)). If you have one of the newer 2.5, 5, or even 10Gb networks, then you might be able to saturate it. I can't with my 1Gb network.It has been 100% reliable to date (about 1 year so far). Recommended!