Pros: Hardware RAID Supports SSD drives

Cons: A fan is needed for this card as heat is a noted issue. Adaptec sells a fan kit for it. Part number is 2275100-R. However, it is hard to find online. Any 40mm fan will work. I am using a Noctua fan. Newegg part number is N82E16835608033. Noctua fans are quiet and very reliable. I took one star off for using the word "single" instead of "bare bones" or "without cable, software, and installation guide" or "card only". I took another star off for not including a fan when Adaptec admits that cooling is a problem and the heat sink used on the card is designed to hold a fan.

Overall Review: A cable is required for this card. Adaptec makes three different cables for this card. Two are for SAS and one is for SATA. Newegg sells two of them: 2275300-R for SAS and 2272300-R for SATA. The third is 2275200-R. The word "single" at the end of the product title means that it includes only the card and a low profile bracket. It does not include: -Quick Installation Guide(English/French/German/Italian/Spanish/Japanese) -Software and documentation DVDs -Cable: one mSASx4-4SATA x1-SB, 0.7m Newegg sells the same card with these items with the word "kit" at the end of the product title. It comes with the above items. Part number is N82E16816103229.

Pros: Adaptec reliable Great looking cables (make sure you get the one that comes with cables!) Fits into any PCIe slot The drives attached to the controller are always instantly ready, this small factor makes my whole system run more fluidly. This is also true when accessing the drives over a network, very fluid file access.

Cons: The controller kernel really does add a significant wait to boot times. Though it is worth the wait, it's something for speed freak like me to consider. Apparently all adaptec controllers have long boot times. PCIe 1x caps around 1GB/sec transfer, so this card would max out with four vertex2 drives or two vertex3 drives. I miss out on 250GB with my 3 x 1.5TB drive Raid 1E array because the maximum size is 2TB.

Overall Review: I have this setup with 3 1.5TB hard drives in a Raid 1E and my 120GB Vertex2 SSD as a single volume. My SSD runs faster on the controller and I've seen writes over 200mb/sec transferring from my 1E array to my SSD.

Pros: Fast, dependable, reliable, low cost

Cons: No way to use with a battery of flash backup adapter. Only way to turn on write caching without risk, is to use a UPS.

Overall Review: Purchased this to upgrade from a software raid 10 to a hardware raid 1. Pretty much tripled the overall speed of my computer, even with write caching turned off. Very affordable. This card doesn't have an interface/plug-in to use with a battery or flash module, so don't make the mistake of purchasing one to use with this card like I did. If you want to use a flash module, you'll need to buy a more costlier model. You can, however use a UPS, which would allow you to turn write caching on. Very easy to setup. I'd recommend this card for someone just getting into raid, or for anyone who wants a fast dependable raid on a budget.

Pros: Works with the right drivers from VMWare's website and performs better than our M1015 drives in terms of datastore speeds. Makes good use of a PCI-E x1 slot.

Cons: 500MB/s maximum throughput may limit the effectiveness of any SSDs or really fast drives you attach.

Overall Review: Probably the most useful thing we could have stuck in the x1 slot in our server - has been working without hassle for months once the drivers were installed.

Pros: Easy to setup, works well with ESXi once the bundle and VIB have been imported.

Cons: Runs very hot. Since I installed it, the system has been resetting itself right before the fans freak out. The carb itself is very hot to the touch, so you need a dedicated fan just for it to run properly.

Pros: This card would boot Windows 7 on a Gigabyte Z77 board where the High Point 2640x1 would not. Please see my comments below.

Cons: It does indeed take a long time to boot. This will be a drag to those who turn their machines off everyday. They run hot and I mean hot.

Overall Review: I was using the Highpoint card on Gigabyte's Z68 motherboards and it worked very well but would not with the newer Z77 boards. You have to press any key to boot to the drive with the Highpoint. So, I tried this Adaptec card, paying the higher price, and it works perfectly. The Z77 board boots up fine and the Z77 Extreme 4 board from ASRock works the same. The Highpoint card did boot okay with the ASRock board, so something is incompatible between Highpoint and Gigabyte. The transfer speed difference however, between the Highpoint and this card is amazing. Seagate Barracudas on the Highpoint were around the low hundreds in reads and this card is sometimes a little over two hundred. I installed Hitachi SAS 15k drives in RAID 1 with this card and could achieve 300 reads. I tried Seagate Cheetah 15k drives with this card and they did not write very well. The reads were okay but the writes were terrible and I saw on the Web some people with the same problem, and their advice was to try the Hitachi's with Adaptec cards and they were correct. So, I have purchased ten of these cards and have created Barracuda RAID 1's and Hitachi RAID 1's and they work very nicely. I am dissapointed that I cannot use the Cheetah's with this card but the Hitachi's warranty is the same. The heat problem is a worry to me, but I have four fans in these workstations so I think I will be alright for now.

Pros: Affordable hardware RAID solution, steep learning curve, lots of options and expandability, good support, got it for $20 dollars less somewhere else. 4 OCZ vertex2 60GB SSDs were easy to RAID0, 6GB/s

Cons: Havent been able to get Windows 7 to continue installing after first reboot (I'm doing something wrong). Did not come with a cable. Loading kernel during system boot adds 40 secs or so to boot time. No UEFI BIOS support yet.

Overall Review: My first real RAID controller. Hope I don't brick it

Pros: Installed easily with two solid state drives 6's mirrored without any difficulty

Cons: #1) If you use their software to format any disk either the solid state drives or any other drive Windows 2008 server will not recognize the NTFS formating and will not installl on it . This may be a problem with Window 2008 however I think Adaptec ought to provide a work around in their software to make this simple . Windows 2000 server use to have a utility that woudl format most anything prior to loading the operating system. The utiliity in 2008 is far more restricted in its ability #2) They make a big thing about air flow and temperature of the card but provide no diagnostic utilities on the card to tell you what the temperature is . #3) The cards bios does not interface with the on board adaptec server board bios so you have to endure to adaptec boot sequences that coudl have been accomplished with one . Thne only reason to endure this is to get the 6 meg transfer rate from the disks that this card allows.

Overall Review: At this point I am happy with the product but disappointed that I could not work around the issue with Windows server despite tyring numerous work arounds and drivers