Pros: Great card simple install. Works perfectly with a SAS to SATA cable. Will buy another when I need more drives.

Cons: Card gets kind of hot.

Pros: In Linux, the downside of getting a high end RAID card is that you're generally locked in to a few specific distributions that work with the binary blob drivers that you can download. On multiple occasions, this has really nailed me into a system with no upgrade path because updating the kernel would break driver compatibility. My preferred solution has been to get a few really bare bones card that just gives me enough ports and then use software RAID. Admittedly, my uses are "professional" (HPC) but not exactly "enterprise".

This is a mostly bare bones with a handful of really nice bonus features. Drivers are a non-issue in any recent Linux version as they are built in to the kernel. In particular, the last two LTS versions of Ubuntu require no user setup. The hard drives are nearly indistinguishable from drives plugged directly into the motherboard unlike some cheap SATA cards where you can get shorts delays in certain operations such as SMART tests.

The price is great for a card with this many connections. In addition, you get the SAS plugs which reduce the cable pollution in most cases. More importantly, this has good options for staged hard drive spin-ups which takes some of the strain off the power supply.

Cons: Remember that you'll need "forward" breakout cables if you want to plug hard drives in directly. Or you can search for a server chassis with a compatible backplane.

Other Thoughts: Just make sure you understand what you're getting. This doesn't have any built in RAID options (intentionally). At this price point, it would be fake-RAID which is bad anyway. You can't plug your hard drives directly into this card without a special cable.

Pros: - Easy way to add 8 JBOD drives to your computer!

Cons: - none

Other Thoughts: I use these in my UNRAID server, and they work perfectly. Speed/Throughput is perfect, and I've never had any issues.

Pros: This is a nice card - I was just looking for a plain jane JBOD card for a 12 port external chassis (I also bought a int->ext adapter) to use with ZFS. It picked up 8 of my 12 4TB drives, and went on it's way.

Cons: It truly only supports 8 devices! I typically purchase LSI cards, and even when flashed to 'real' JBOD mode, support more than enough devices per card.
I didn't read the specs on this card. My fault.

Pros: Installed in my server running Ubuntu Server 15.04. Recognized immediately with no additional configuration. Connected 6 drives and had them added to my ZFS pool in minutes!

Cons: None.

Other Thoughts: Awesome card if you don't need RAID (you can always configure RAID in your OS, or just use ZFS; it's way better). Connected drives using a couple StarTech SFF-8087 to 4x SATA cables and all drives were recognized out of the box.

Pros: Excellent value. Has delayed spin up to avoid PSU surge. Supported my 4TB HGST drives for new home made NAS.

Cons: Runs hot, just put a slot fan next to it.

Other Thoughts: Needed a card to support 8 4TB drives for Windows 2012R2 storage spaces. I run dual parity and while that sacrifices a lot of overhead this card screams. I can get 100MB/s writing to the pool.

Pros: Eureka! This is exactly what I was looking for, an 8 port 6Gbps card with no raid. Didn't want the added cost of unneeded RAID functionality as I planned to use ZFS.

Plugged the card in, it detected all my drives, installed CentOS 7 onto the first drive, and all was well. There were no issues whatsoever.

Including cables with this card, which may or may not be correct for your system, would only drive up the cost, so I consider this a pro. I'll go buy my own cables.

Cons: none

Other Thoughts: Saw the older reviews, stating the driver was not in the Linux kernel. However, I already owned a Highpoint card, with a similar Marvell chipset, which also worked out of the box.

Pros: N/A

Cons: A month and 4 days is how long port #2 appeared to work. Now seeking RMA with SuperMicro since warranty period expired with Newegg. It totally scrapped my supposedly redundant RAID10 because I switched the port on another drive and it destroyed the data on that one too.

Pros: Does what I needed it to!

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: I bought 2 of these about 6 months apart while building a file server. I had purchased a few cheaper SATA cards which resulted in reboots and numerous failures. SAS was the only real option and these cards aren't terribly expensive. Combined with FlexRaid they're perfect.

Pros: SFF-8087 is nice for cable management
*remarkably* good value for 8 internal SAS/SATA ports (JBOD)
Linux kernel 3.2+ supports it without any fussing around

Cons: active cooling with an easily replaceable fan would have been a nice feature (not much of a complaint but it's all I can think of to put here)

Other Thoughts: 1) When buying SFF-8087 cables, make sure you get FORWARD cables (meaning the 8087 connector is at controller side).

2) If airflow is not very good when the card is installed, you may have to rig up a solution to get air blowing on it (e.g. in my tower case I could use a PCI slot cooler to blow air up onto the card & help move air upward in the case toward exhaust fans).

Basically, if you just need to hook up some internal SATA drives and you don't want hardware RAID, this card is a smart choice.