Pros: It took under an hour in configuration before I had available storage. the SFF-8087 cables are a very nice length. supports 4TB drives. You don't need to be an engineer to install it.

Cons: I wish I could have found documentation that it supported 4TB drives. The controller's BIOS is rather slow to boot and there is no mention of that in the quick start guide, causing me to think my board was DOA until I took a few minutes to RTFI and gave it time to boot (a watched pot never boils)

Other Thoughts: This was a storage upgrade, from a Jbod, on an existing NVR built on an Intel BOXDX79TO main board. If you keep everything Intel it seems to play well together. Searching videos is substantially better (running RAID5) than it was on the jbod. Being a RAID novice, I was unaware that the SFF-8087 cables supplied would connect my SATA drives, I wish the documentation would have done a better job of explaining that.

Pros: Easy setup
Has a hookup for standard HDD activity LED
Comes with cables
Compatible with consumer-line setups
Support for drives as big as they make
Smoking fast RAID 5 with the BBU and write-cache enabled
Does not get super hot like some say, but my PSU fan blows right on it
Beeper can be turned off in software

Cons: No JBOD, though it lets you setup a RAID 0 with a single drive, might as well be JBOD.
Battery doesn't seem to charge past 63%... but tells me it has 3 days of juice which is consistent with a full charge.
This card takes an entire 60 seconds to initialize, but who really shuts down their server anyways?

Other Thoughts: I have this in a PCIe x16 slot on a consumer line motherboard (a low-end one at that), running Windows Home Server 2011. This thing works flawlessly. I'm truly impressed, as I was expecting problems.

I have 7x 3TB 7200RPM drives in a RAID5, and a 500GB in a single RAID0 (first for me).The write speeds to the RAID5 are so fast it saturates my gigabit Ethernet at 123 MB/s. Never seen a RAID5 right so fast.

I first set it up with just 3 of the 3TB drives, as I wanted to test the OCE capability. Once integrity was built and I filled the 6TB array, I performed a capacity expansion to all 7 drives (18TB). This took about 5.5 days to complete. As a test I shut down and rebooted several times during the OCE process and it didn't even hiccup. On boot it just picked right back up where it left off. When complete, a simple extend partition command in Disk Management was all that was needed.

As a note to those who haven't dealt with large arrays before, if you ever intend on extending a partition beyond 16TB, you need to choose the correct cluster size (allocation unit) when initially formatting. By default NTFS uses a 4KB cluster size, which limits the partition to 16TB. Using an 8KB or 16KB cluster size will give you 32TB or 64TB max respectively, though any cluster size over 4KB disables NTFS compression.

Overall I would recommend this card to anyone.

Pros: Easy to setup. This controller is practically ready to go. Saw all the disks and setting up the RAID was a cake walk.

Once the array was built and I got to using it (8 x Western Digital RE4 WD2003FYYS 2TB), I was really surprised by the speed. I'm even more pleased to say that it has remained fast.

Seriously, this is just as fast as my SSD. Grant you, it is taking 8 HDDs and an awesome controller to get close to an SSD.

Bottom line: I have 12.7 TB of usable space that I have nothing but a good time accessing. Not one single issue with this setup.

Cons: None.

Other Thoughts: This product does what it says it will and well. Not the cheapest controller out there, but I wasn't looking for cheap. I was looking to get my money's work and I did.

Pros: Everything went pretty smoothly. It was confusing to have RAID 10 essentially be RAID 1 with more than 2 disks, but once I figured that out, everything else went really smoothly. Excellent numbering on the cables so you know which drive is which. The cable management on the SATA cables are really a nice touch as well.

Cons: It runs pretty hot, so make sure you have a case fan pointed at the heat sink.

The BIOS configuration for the controller is hard to understand and it sucks. Once you install your OS though, and go through the Web UI interface things are much easier to understand and configure.

Other Thoughts: I haven't really figured out how to get it so it doesn't spin down drives all the time. This isn't a heavy traffic server so not all the drives are in use a lot. Just a thought would be to allow people to configure this option.

Pros: This card works well for an 8 bay hot swap case. Easy to configure and has hardware RAID. has large heatsink and does not get terribly hot.

Cons: The placement on the internal SAS connectors is a bit high for a 2U case. You have to bend the cables almost immediately and can cause some bunching when installing with multiple cards.

Other Thoughts: I have 8 3TB 7200 sata drives configured in RAID 6. Almost 500MB/s read and 250MB/s write over the network. This card was perfect for the server build. I would not recommend putting this card in a consumer grade build.

Pros: Hardware RAID

Cons: -NOT A SAS CONTROLLER...after I bought the card and SAS drives, plugged them all up and it recognized the SAS drives, but only to tell me it doesn't support them.
-Heatsink can boil water, need a dedicated fan intake/outtake right next to it.
-BIOS not compatible with most motherboards...need to install on a GUI based OS to be able to configure it
-Array rebuilds must be done without a reboot. So if you have to boot to a GUI to get it configured, you have a 3hour min downtime for it to rebuild.
-Does NOT work with multipliers

Other Thoughts: I crushed this card with my foot after the incessant beeping after arrays degraded. The best I've felt about this card since ownership. I would rather setup a backup server and run on no RAID than use this card.

Pros: Great card and great performance.

Cons: I took off 1 egg because the RAID setup was not too easy and I wasn't aware that the advertised SSD caching was an additional $200 add on module.

Other Thoughts: Great add on for performance freaks like me. Just beware that if you want the SSD caching feature you have to buy the $200 key.

Pros: Put 8 SATA III SSD drives on this controller and they are smoking! Works great in an X8 PCIe slot.

Cons: Had to scrounge up a PS2 keyboard so I configure this thing.

Other Thoughts: This is a great option if you want to use multiple SATA III devics beyond the 2 normally found in the X79 chipset.

Pros: Easy to use software and to install. I initially wanted to just use the card to connect 8 SATA drives to my system, I would then use raid later. Was told by Intel you could not do this turns out you can.

Cons: Needed to upgrade the firmware not big deal,was surprised at how old the code shipped on the card.

Other Thoughts: To use the card as connection to single drives set as raid 0 then select the size of the drive installed. Right now I am running 4 independent drives as 4 logical 1,5TB drives

Pros: Real raid, fast, x8 bandwidth

Cons: Doesn't support JBOD

Other Thoughts: If you're going to use write cache, make sure to get the battery backup or plug it into a UPS