Pros: Good performance, easy to use Web interface for management. Email notification of events is very nice. I bought this controller in February of 2013, and it's worked perfectly every day. I keep this machine on literally 24/7 and it's been a champ.

Cons: Honestly can't think of any cons.

Other Thoughts: Currently using this for 2 RAID6 sets comprised of 4 Seagate ST3000DM001 drives each, so 8 3TB drives total, allowing me 12TB of space. Performance is as good as it can be considering it's RAID6, but I like knowing that any 2 drives can fail within the array and my data is still available. Of course, RAID is not backup, and I keep a healthy rotation of backups both locally and onsite.

Great controller, no complaints. I had 1 drive fail and it handled it without issue. Popped in the replacement drive and its rebuilding now. Like I said in the pros, I really like the email notifications.

Pros: none

Cons: I'm now on a mission. I am Johnny Appleseed, and my message is that any highpoint product - if you are running on linux - is going to leave you in the lurch, so badly you will be just as enraged as I am right now.

My rocketraid card - 2013 - has pathetically outdated drivers on their site. You can try to compile the 2012 driver software you can get from their site. When that does not work, you find forums on the 'net that provide help and even source patches to get you to kernel 3.10. When you fail even with those patches (say, on kernel 4.x on fedora 21), you will have no choice - you must try to get support from the vendor. There, they insist you enter your serial number. When you do this, they call it 'invaild' (not valid). You get THREE TRIES, and then you are completely done. Buy someone else's product and live without your server for a day or two.

There is no phone number, no further recourse. No way to email them at all.

AVOID Highpoint. It's insane to give them any of your money. One day, you too will be as enraged as I am right now. It's as certain as the sun rising.

Pros: Works native with my Hackintosh 10.10.1

Cons: Gets hot, added a fan on top of it

Pros: Worst fake raid ever. I don't mind fake raid, but it has to at least work. This thing fails as much as daily.

Cons: Highpoint support is basically worthless. THey try to blame the issues on any other thing... The drives, the weather, whatever. It doesn't matter that their drivers are spitting out errors in the event log that are not related to hardware.

Other Thoughts: The fact that it is software raid rather than hardware raid should meant the they can fix their issues, however they are not even trying. Their support may take a week or more to not answer a question. The answers usually are not related to the question or problem. U am thinking they have basic communications issues as well as lack of knowledge on their products.

Pros: Don't know of any - though it claims 8 SATA ports, it doesn't actually have any. You have to buy extra, expensive cables to actually use SATA .

Cons: Since there are no actual SATA ports, you have to spend $$$$ to buy breakout cables for it, which also greatly limits any flexibility you might have or need (each 4 connector right angle SATA cable costs 30 DOLLARS!).

Other Thoughts: I contacted their support about the missing cables and they were rather snide with me. I won't be doing business with them again.

Pros: Very cheep for what you get
Fast controller with a lot of features
BIOS interface is extremely easy to use

Cons: The driver installer that shipped with it did not work. I couldn't even install them manually using device manager. I had to download them from the site and run the 64 bit installer. Maybe it's specific to Windows 8.1 but I didn't check on another OS

Other Thoughts: I'm using this for my PLEX server. 8 drivers in a RAID 5. Performance preferred over redundancy as the entire RAID set will be copied to another build.

Pros: Cheapish
Fastish (for a hybrid card)

Cons: Lies about individual drives' SMART data (doesn't show "real" numbers)
Slow rebuilds / drive checks
Issue with AMD booting (ASROCK mobo with Phenom II x4 - issue was "fixed" when upgraded CPU to FX-8350)
Just found BIG issue trying to RAID 5 with three 4TB HDs - created array, tested, discovered write speeds of only 40MBps! - rebuilt as RAID0 with same drives, write speed jumped to 450 MBps. Workaround- set back to RAID5, but manually set the size down from default (max size) to 7950 GB - for some reason, this worked, and now get expected write speed of 320 MBps. (Read speed was always good)

Other Thoughts: Would like to see new firmware that fixes the SMART issue, but am not holding my breath.

Pros: Small, BSD driver

Cons: none

Other Thoughts: For my first NAS build, this piece was a nice addition. Running 8 2.5" 500GB drives off it.

Pros: inexpensive, easy to set up, nice Web based user interface, supports RAID 6, software RAID. Pretty fast.

Cons: so i got this card thinking i would try to do a big no-no of using the seagate barracuda's in RAID (my mistake). The drives kept dropping out of the array. I ended up keeping 4 seagate barracuda 3 TB drives in JBOD and they were fine for almost a year.
I got some 3TB WD red drives to put in RAID 5, knowing the western digital drives have TLER. All of the drives, both the segates and the WD's kept dropping out of RAID. I contacted customer support and they told me that the WD red drives were not enterprise RAID drives and are not supported by the sgl2720. it took me a while to convince them that there was something wrong with the card, but once i did they did RMA it for me.

Other Thoughts: There customer support was not the greatest and the responses i got were not worded very clearly (most likely the people doing the customer support did not speak English as their primary language).

Technically they only support enterprise RAID drives for RAID environment so if you want to use WD red drives be wary.

all in all i had one card fail within a year winch is NOT what i want with a RAID card. but since it is a software raid i was able to install the new card and all of the data was still in there.

Pros: Update:
Initially setup 7 x 4tb Seagate ST4000DM000 / STBD4000400 on RAID 6 over a year ago. It took about 12 hours to build the array. I had about 18.2tb usable, and getting about 700MB/s read and 698MB/s writes (sequential).

I just expanded the array with another 4tb drive (same Seagate brand to have 8 x 4tb hard drives). Now getting over 800MB/s sequential read and write speeds.

Cons: I heard many mixed reviews and was a bit worried before I bought the drives. Thankfully everything is working fine.

Expansion took about 3 days. This is one of the drawbacks of not getting a FULLY dedicated RAID card (this card apparently uses a hybrid approach), but I knew what I was getting into since you can't beat the price and don't really need fast rebuild speeds.

Other Thoughts: I'm also using Intel RAID0 (for my crucial SSDs) as my boot drive. I've heard many people having issues with this. It took me a few minutes to google the solution: flash the RAID BIOS, and disable two features: "Reallocate EBDA" and "INT13".