Pros: Cheap, 8 ports on an 8x PCI-E means you get full SATA speed per port (or close enough to it).

Cons: A nightmare to get running on Linux.

Other Thoughts: I got this card working on Debian last year, and ran it just fine with kernels 3.2 through 3.16. The drivers page is here, you'll want the "Linux open source" driver (which looks like a binary blob to me).

http://www.highpoint-tech.com/USA_new/cs-series_rr2600_download.htm

The 4.0 kernel hit stretch recently, and I have not been able to get this card running again under that new kernel. So maybe they'll issue a new version of the driver, or maybe I was just doing something wrong. Either way, it has been a lot of work to keep this thing running under Linux, and I'm done. Port expanders ahoy.

Pros: I was losing partitions in Win 7 using an onboard RAID controller (Asus Sabertooth 990 FX was the MB) and a RAID card like this one was $300 at my local store. I have 4 of these in prodution right now about to add 2 more.

Cons: haven't had to recover a lost drive yet so no cons so far

Pros: I have had this controller with 7 1.5tb drivers for a long time. 6 being used as raid 5 and 1 as a spare. Recently I ran out of space and added my spare to the raid 5. It took about 2 days to merge the drive, but the GUI did it all. After I added it I had to use diskpart command to expand the drive.

I love the email feature and have been using rocketraid brand for many years.

Speed good for software raid.

Cons: Software raid. But I knew this before I bought it. If it was hardware raid it would cost more.

Pros: Newegg's outstanding service.

Cons: This card doesn't even do the bare essentials of what its designed for. I tried 3 different types of array with this card - RAID 1, 5, and 10. Each time after the RAID was initialized, the card would forget the array even existed. I have 7x 3TB hard drives and an initialization takes 5 days, what a waste of time. Upgrading the firmware does not help. The card's BIOS and WebGUI don't even talk to each other resulting in mismatch of information between the two.

Other Thoughts: This was my first time buying a HighPoint card, I generally use Intel. I tried to save a few bucks and it just wasted my time. Save yourself the hassle and disappointment, buy something from another company. I am very grateful Newegg allowed me to return after 30 days, it's service like that why I keep coming back!

Pros: This is a cheap yet powerful card for entry level RAID systems. The setup of RAID arrays is pretty straightforward. It was a breeze to configure a 16TB RAID 5 array using 4TB drives. And one of my favorite features, the management software can send emails in the event of drive failure.

Cons: Update the BIOS as soon as you install this card! The unit I received had the original BIOS from 2008 and would not recognize the 4TB drives I had plugged into it. The drivers on the CD were also from 2008 and useless. I also had problems getting the management software to recognize the controller, but after installing it as administrator that started working.

Other Thoughts: I have used several HighPoint RAID controllers now. They all have their own little faults, but they do work. I highly recommend them if you aren't concerned about peak performance. This card is compatible with the Asus P8Z77-V motherboard, but you may not be able to access the controller BIOS with a wireless keyboard.

Pros: Price is good, Good setup and management tools once in the OS. was able to handle 8 2T drives with out issue.

Cons: Weird initial setup. Never sure if I really initialized the array. could not get it to work with XEN on a supermicro Intel server board. But working just fine in a system running Windows 2008 On an AMD desktop board. One thing to note. I tried hard and could not get it to be used as a boot drive for Windows 2008 R2. I ended up putting it in as a secondarily and added a pair of smaller drives for the OS.

Other Thoughts: I would not use this in anything that you are in a hurry to setup. It took me much longer than I wanted it to when setting up the first one. Give yourself some time and you should be ok. Cant really beat the price for a some what speedy Raid 5 of 8 drives.

Pros: I installed this card in the family file server I was building. It is controlling 3x2TB Seagate HDDs in a RAID 5 array and 3x500GB Hitachi HDDs in another RAID 5 array.

So far it has been performing fine. Sequential reads and writes on the 2TB array are over 250MB/s.

Cons: One will have to purchased SFF-8087 breakout cables separately. But for the price that is understandable.

The heatsink is tiny and it gets very hot to the touch.

Other Thoughts: I was a tad concerned about the lack of proper cooling so I fashioned a larger heatsink from an old passive chipset cooler I had. I used Arctic Silver Alumina Thermal Adhesive to attach it.

Pros: Card is fast with many options for ports

Cons: Software is garbage, firmware clashes with onboard devices on two separate motherboards boards.
There is no support for recent Linux kernels. The "Open source driver" on their page is just a wrapper for a half dozen binary files.

Pros: Easy setup with up to 8 drives in RAID. Currently used in a WHS 2011 build with 5 WD Green Drives in RAID 5 for backing up my Video (BluRay / DVD) collection. The card has worked flawlessly and the performance has caused no issues is streaming video.

Cons: Wish it had included the cables for connection to the SATA drives. Guess thought that with the cost of the cables it would keep the price of the card down if I needed to buy a new card.

Other Thoughts: For the vlaue to performance I am more than pleased.

Pros: Cheap, affordable, Raid 10

Cons: After a reboot, the raid 10 array disappeared. I checked the power supply and cables, they were fine. The bios indicated array is not there (legacy mode) yet the 4 drives are there and in normal condition.

Other Thoughts: getting a quote from a data recovery service is not what I would expect but that's what I get for trying to use use raid and not being educated enough on it.