3ware Internal 9750-4i SATA/SAS 6Gb/s PCI-Express 2.0 w/ 512MB onboard memory Controller Card, Single

Pros: After initial setup the card is working so far,

Cons: It comes with an older firmware and does not support 4tb drives out of the box.

none of the instructions make any sense on how to update the firmware. Nothing online makes sense.

Utterly shameful and frustrating to the point of wishing I bought another brand.

Pros: Really great feature set and intuitive configuration. Have 4 Samsung 830s in RAID5 with this card. So fast. 700MB/s average r/w; 1GB/s read. This card is compatible with the ASUS KGPE-D16 right out of the box. Shows up in MOBO BIOS correctly and everything.

Cons: None so far.

Other Thoughts: I am not using a expander or backplane etc. so I probably should have gotten the 8i. Two SAS ports would have been nice. If you want to hook up more than 4 drives you will need a back plane, expander or the like but for the cost I wold look to the 8i model if you don't need more than 8 drives and plan to keep everything in one housing.

Pros: Work great as advertised

Cons: Have to upgrade the firmware before using even for the first time, this is a bit of a hassle and carries some risk for lower skilled users.
Realistically the cards should work without fail out of box, being forced to update the card just to get it to work is hoakey in my opinion.
Also, the instructions to update the firmware properly is a bit WEAK considering the URGENT need to update the firmware properly in the first place; they should consider redoing some documentation on this card.

Other Thoughts: Seems fast and works great in my raid 10
I'm happy, the useless DVD included could be omitted if you are being forced to download new drivers/firmware anyhow.

Pros: Great RAID card, adding the BBU is a must if you want to have the highest possible write speeds (N82E16816118118), RAID 10 and 5 have been tested with WD RE drives, its amazing.

Cons: N/A

Pros: LSI Support. They worked hard to resolve.

Cons: DOES NOT WORK WITH X8SAX Server board.

Other Thoughts: Spent 4 weeks between SuperMicro and LSI/3Ware trying to identify bottleneck issue.

Initial 2TB RAID format took over 2 days! The prior gen 9650SA would only take 2 or so HOURS!

Did everything from re-flashing bios on both MB and RAID card, trying alternate RAM, re-configuring stripe size... list goes on and on.

SuperMicro tech finally says - "Hmmm, you may have discovered an undocumented issue..."

LSI was great - I tried an "old" 3Ware 9650SA and everything flew like it should.

NewEgg was decent on the returns - I bought a large number of them.

Pros: FAST, 512MB buffer makes certain functions even faster, easy to install with Windows 7, good monitoring software

Cons: Price. It's expensive, but you get what you pay for. The 512MB buffer throws off ATTO disk benchmarks. (It was showing 2.2TB/s transfer rates at 256MB blocks!) The initialization takes too long. (It's about 15-20 seconds, where the rest of my boot sequence takes less than 10!) Doesn't include cables. Difficult to hook up an activity LED.

Other Thoughts: I have 2 Vertex 2 120GB drives with this thing, and it works great. I don't understand how other reviewers can complain about this card. I had no issues at all getting this installed with my main drive on Windows 7 Ultimate x64. (Someone who doesn't know what they're doing with installing Win7 might have some issues, but some minor logical reasoning could get you past that.) It performs about 10-15% faster than the Intel ICH (probably the 512MB buffer). I never noticed any high pitched whine from mine. There's really nothing that can make noise on this board. There are no moving parts. I have no idea what that guy is talking about.

Pros: The card is fast and easy to use. Also VM Ware ESX(i) supports this card (you have to do a few steps to install the driver though.)

Cons: Does not include Battery Backup Unit (Newegg # N82E16816118118)

Other Thoughts: This is a good card, it is Low profile, fast, and is supported in VM Ware ESX(i). I don't know why they don't include the BBU as it will disable the write cache if you don't have a BBU and you will loose significant performance.

Pros: It turned on. Easy to set up. BIOS is very intuitive.

Cons: USELESS!!!
-makes high pitch wine noises. Almost makes me want to tear of my ears and burn them.
-Sequential read and write are only 50-60% of what they would be.
-Random read and write are atrocious.
-Lower performance then Intel controllers integrated into basic motherboards.
-Not once did I get through to their "24/7" customer support. Tried calling in all times of the day.

Other Thoughts: 6Gb\s my rear! What a waste of money. Going right back to hell from whence it came.

Pros: Much of what I'd say was already said by PD to be honest. Like him I have an ASUS board (Sabertooth X58) and I found that this card works in my third video card slot. Blazing fast results, and the 512mb cache seems to help even more. Due to the 512mb cache, my read and write speeds on a SINGLE Corsair P3 256gb drive (that's the new SATA III drive by them) are faster then Corsair's benchmark for the drive in Seq. reads and writes, Corsair used the P67 chipset slots on (I think) an ASUS Sabertooth P67 motherboard.

Cons: None really, considering this is the first time I've used a RAID card as opposed to just the SATA or IDE ports on a board, this card was easy to set up. Okay, it is $329.00 as of this moment, but given the speed gains I got I won't complain. That and I always find it silly to complain about price if one is willing to buy something.

Other Thoughts: LSI will claim that the card is only for server motherboards. Maybe it technically is, but again I had no issues plugging it into the one empty PCI-E x8 slot on my board. Again, most of what I'd say was already said by PD. My only major difference is that I didn't have to flash the firmware of my card, everything was recognized by both Windows and my BIOS. My next major purchase will be when X68 boards and socket 2011 CPU's come out, I do suspect that I'll be installing this card into that build.

Pros: Blazing Fast, 512MB cache RAM, works in PCIe 8X Slots designed for graphics, engineers at LSI email you back right away when you submit a question.

I do video editing and flight sim on a rig I built with an i7-950, 24GB Mushkin ram and a GTX470 (yes, one card, video doesn't leverage SLI). Video editing requires a lot of hard drives to distribute the load, I currently have 7 internals. My video footage really needed to sit in RAID0 for extreme read speed, so I bought two WD RE3 1TB RAID drives. I tried the onboard RAID with my EVGA X58 mobo. WHAT A JOKE. Barely got 95mb/sec read speed. So I decided on this 9750-4i based on other editor's recommendations. WOW. 450mb/sec reads now! I drag a 1.3GB file to abother drive and BAM, it moves witout the Windows progress bar even showing up. Incredible.

Cons: Oh, it's not fun shelling out over $300 for a PCI card, but once it's running you'll be overjoyed.
Also, determining the correct cable is a bit confusing, but see my comments below.

Other Thoughts: OK, here's a couple of things to note if you have 2 to 4 internal SATA drives and want to run RAID with the 9750: this 9750-4i version is the "single" version, not the "kit" version. The kit is $60 more, and all you get is the necessary cable to hook up your 9750 to a backplane. That supplied cable will not work with your internal SATA drives, you defintely want this "single" version which comes with NO cable. You'll need to soend 20 bucks for the correct cable that plugs into the card and provides 4 separate SATA plugs, that go into your drives. This is the cable you want: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816116097 . This assumes you are providing power to the drive from your PSU. Also, this card does work in my 3rd PCIe 8X slot on my x58 mobo. LSI tech support will safely say it may not, but it does.
Make sure you download the latest drivers AND firmware update if you run Win7 64-bit. Windows recognized my card but the BIOS didn't. Firmware update fixed that!