LSI Internal SATA/SAS 9211-8i 6Gb/s PCI-Express 2.0 RAID Controller Card, Single

Pros: Card boots just fine, I have two 15000 rpm 256 gig sas drives in a raid 0 striped array, wie 6.5.

Cons: For some reason I can't access my raid controller on my ASUS crosshair 4 formula with this installed, though not really a con. It is the motherboard, not the controller that has the issue.

Other Thoughts: Worth the cash. Works flawlessly.

Pros: Compatible with Consumer (non-server) motherboards.

Cons: This is a lower line (HBA) controller and does not support HDD spindown during drive inactivity. (older versions of firmware supposedly support HDD power down but LSI has been unable to confirm last version this was supported)

Other Thoughts: After much reading and many calls, you have to purchase one of LSIs MegaRaid cards starting with the 9260 line on up in order to get the "Dimmer Switch" power down feature. The next thing to watch is that not all of the 9260+ cards support JBOD (which means you would have to run under RAID). The 9265 card DOES support JBOD, does support Intels RES2SV240 expander(per intel site) and does support HDD power down. So for those not familiar with these levels of cards you will have a number of things to watch for.

Pros: The Card is very well priced and you get what you pay for.

Cons: This card has the slowest read / write speed I have ever seen: This card was bought to be used as a raid 10 on a supermicro motherboard running esxi 5.0 - I created 1 raid 10 data store and 4 single data stores (8 drives total). On the single drive data store the speed was bearable at best.

Other Thoughts: I ended up RMA the two cards and purchased the LSI 9260 -8i, the speed is the best I have ever seen in a raid 10 and I will recommend this card and give it 5 eggs. I forgot to mention the 9211 takes about 3 days for consistency - the 9260 was ready in about 30 sec.

Pros: Solid HBA
Great Linux Driver Support
Proper on-card RAID
RAID 1+0 helps me sleep at night

Cons: No RAID5 support (I knew this going in)

Other Thoughts: Used this to replace a Highpoint card that corrupted a drive on a Centos6 install. Linux drivers are built into all mainline kernels and are rock solid.

3x500Gb WD RE4's in RAID 1+0 gives redundancy and great throughput. Just pair it with a mini-SAS to SATA breakout cable.

In short, if you're looking for a non-fakeraid card, to handle smaller arrays (or just to install your OS onto), this card is in a class of it's own.

Pros: This may be a dumb question, but I'm not familiar with HBAs: Is this card bootable?

Cons: I've found lots of information on this card, but can't seem to find anywhere it conclusively states whether or not one can set up a simple RAID0 array on this card and install the OS on it.

Pros: will this card do jbod right out of the box, i dont see it listed

Cons: question

Pros: Works out-of-the-box with Ubuntu 11.10
Just plugged it in, plugged in a SAS cable from my SAS expander and boom, saw all the drives.
Have gotten up to 650 MB/s write speeds. Haven't tested any higher yet.

Cons: Took up the only pci-e slot on my microATX board. Oh well

Pros: I built a NAS with 2 of these cards and I am getting excellent performance with cheap 5400rpm 4k sector "green" drives. Solaris 11 express recognized it immediately. This is the card you want for your zfs RAIDz array.

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: Don't waste your time and money trying other cards and struggling with possible compatibility issues. THIS is the card to use for a zfs array on Solaris / FreeBSD / OpenIndiana / FreeNAS. Its huge bandwidth and ease of use make it a no brainer.

Pros: Fast Card, No Issues with performance! Supports raid 10

Cons: No Raid 5 support, Don't forget the extra cables

Other Thoughts: This is the same controller card that ships in the Sun x4175 m2 server as the standard controller. If Sun is shipping it it has to be ok.

Pros: 8 Drive capability
Extremely high IO
Excellent price/Performance

Cons: No Raid 5/6
No Fan (under heavy load the processor can get a bit toasty)

Other Thoughts: 4 Crucial M4s in raid 0 are giving me ~ 1800mb/sec. 4 Acard ramdisks in raid 0 giving me ~700mb/sec. Excellent performance for the price. Very happy with it.