Pros: Fast and great tech support from LSI.

Cons: WebBIOS doesn't work properly with some motherboard BIOSes. Fan-out cables are not included -- Come on! It's a $600 RAID card. My first card had issues with resetting itself every few hours but was replaced under RMA (I had to fork out the shipping costs).

Other Thoughts: LSI states it may not be completely compatible with ASUS motherboards and others have stated the X79 chipset could experience issues with this card. Having had this card installed for almost a year now, I beg to differ. Once they replaced my faulty first card, it has been rock solid. Another thing to note is the operating temperature of the ROC chip. LSI Tech Support recommends keeping it under 115C. Ensure you have proper cooling otherwise the card's life will be a short one. I took care of the problem utilizing an auxiliary fan attached to a PCI slot mount which keeps it at a steady 70C.

Pros: Easy to setup. Excellent driver support.
No issues with x8 OCZ SSD Vertex 4 drives.
Fast, 3000 mb/sec rates when used with x8 high end SSDs.

Cons: Failed after 8 months.

Other Thoughts: Lack of a fan on the heatsink may have been a cause of its early downfall. Why they stopped putting an active fan doesn't make sense, for a $600 card, it should include one. Or at least a much better heatsink.

Pros: Combined with Intel 530s and a few 3TB disks, seeing well over 2.2GBps writes and 3GBps+ reads with a deep random queue.

Other boxes we have that use this combined with the JBOD 45 drive Supermicro chassis combined with a handful of more SSDs with the cachecade license and still push over 500MBps sustained 40/60 random read writes.

Cons: Getting accurate statistics from the SSDs is a pain, mediocre support. Do not expect to run manufacturer provided SSD utilities to check health.
BBU is separate at this pricepoint, and it should come with it. Never a good idea to have write-back cache without a bbu, and this card has a gb of ram onboard.

Other Thoughts: Price should not be a concern with this card. Compared to big brand OEM controllers such as HP, Dell percs etc, this one still has the richest most advanced feature set. Choose this card if you plan on running something that has heavy IO requirements, or heavy controller requirements (Eg RAID6, 60 etc).

As for the other posters temp issues, I run these cards in 2u and 1u supermicro chassis with the average card temperature of about 65-80c with the low end being in a colo, and the high end in a less temperature controlled environment.

Pros: Fast

Cons: Expensive
Lots of extra options to buy to make it enterprise worthy (BBU, Fastpath), very cheap to not include
Cables have quality control problems
Runs extremely hot, requires dedicated cooling if in a workstation chassis

Other Thoughts: Vables included have quality control problems. They are breakout cables of graduated length, and the 4th channel (longest) only connected at 3Gb/s on one of the cables, the other worked fine. A replacement card had the same problem on one cable, so they obviously are finicky (assume it's right at the limit of the SATA III spec).

The card itself is solid and fast, although the entire system ground to a halt, 50 kb/s speeds, without dedicated cooling (card was 105C!!!). Worked much better with a PCI cooler next to it.

Unhappy with the extra cost of the BBU and Fastpath to make it enterprise worthy - for the cost of the card, throw that stuff in.

And I wish I'd gotten the 4-port and the Intel expander card, about the same price with expandability for 20 drives over 8 with this one.