LSI MegaRAID SATA/SAS 8888ELP 3Gb/s PCI-Express w/ 512MB onboard memory RAID Controller Card, Kit

Pros: I got this card on sale (black friday). It works great with linux Fedora 17 and with Win 7 64

Cons: none

Other Thoughts: the web BIOS option for this controller does not work for my mobo (Crosshair IV Formula) - system issue. This is not a big problem - cli works at bios level, and both gui and cli tools work well in both , Win 7 64 and Fedora 17 64.

Pros: This is an older card (Circa 2009) that still works great today and is still supported in ESXi 5.1. It only supports SATA 2, but let's face it, platter-based hard drives still can't sustain SATA 3 speeds, so that is fine.

This card has two different BIOS screens - one is a GUI-based BIOS with mouse support, and one is a CLI. It's nice to have that flexibility.

Speed is good - about 500MB/s in a 4-disk stripe using Western Digital 500GB RE3 drives. Haven't tested Raid5 yet.

The windows configuration utility is powerful and flexible. Updating firmware is a breeze. I immediately updated to the latest firmware, which was recent (November 2012 IIRC). It seems LSI is still supporting this card well.

Cons: Loud beep on power up and power down, even if alarm is disabled. Complicated, non-intuitive BIOS CLI.

Other Thoughts: Before you buy this card, be aware it is NOT a 16-port card. You can choose either the internal or the external connectors, or one of each, but not all four. Also, you must override the cache disable if you don't also have the BBU.

The GUI BIOS will not load if you have any other cards in your system that load their BIOS *after* this one. So, you may need to disable other cards to do the initial configuration from BIOS.

Pros: When they work, they're fairly good cards.

Cons: Unfortunately, we've 2 out of 2 fail in the first 6 months of ownership.
Battery backed cache module is both a DIMM AND a battery melded together, so you can't buy a larger aftermarket cache DIMM because it won't have battery backing.
The BIOS -> GUI interface for configuration is quite possibly one of the worse pieces of software UI in the known universe. It makes Windows 1.0 look slick.

Other Thoughts: We bought these cards because we'd had problems with the Areca 1680s from 2 years ago occasionally going offline (once every 6 to 18 months) and needing to be rebooted to see the RAID array. Never lost any data, but it was annoying. However, now that we've had to hard failures of these cards in 6 months, I'm beginning to reconsider my position.

Pros: BIOS easy to configure. Older RAID cards are popular and most OSs have drivers.

Cons: Tech support is very poor. Refuses service, misquotes written warranties, makes excuses, etc.. These RAID cards require BBU units that are very expensive, and my last three lasted less than 1 year each. LSI does not honor 1 year BBU written warranty. The last excuse was I did not have the BBU serial number on the purchase receipt. Well, no one does. Why don't they say: Go away little customers - we don't want to see you? Bad support attitude and hard to communicate anything.

Other Thoughts: RAID requires the entire package to work, hardware, software, and batteries, or it is not a good investment. Choose your vendor carefully.

Pros: Works using built-in kernel 2.6 drivers.

Cons: Utilities, Storage Managers, etc are built for limited linux distro only. No source code available, therefore can't compile your own, e.g. when using Debian or Ubuntu. Don't buy if your using above distro.

Pros: Excellent performance, low profile, perfect for servers.

Cons: Kit only comes with 1 SFF8087 to 4 fanout cable, with 8 ports what are you supposed to do? They also are desktop type sata w/ power, not meant for a backplane... plan on spending another $100 on cables.