Day 1, easy install & setup. 1+ year later & it still works great. Insane bandwidth on a 8TBx4 Raid 0 setup. Price was worth it.
We purchased this card because it supports SSD drives. Created a RAID 6, with 6 SSD 30GB, Vertex Turbo drives. The system runs extremely fast.
Able to pas through these two ports using ESXi 5.1 to a Windows VM. ESXi did detect this adapter, and could have even used it for datastores.
Super fast file transfer Recognized all of my 24 WD 12TB HDDs upon drivers install without any issues. Comes in IT mode firmware preinstalled so great right out of the box. Extremely well constructed.
No isses, bios detected right away. Ive used all 4 ports, in just about every configuration and not had any issues. Transfter speeds between drives seems to be up to spec.
True hardware based RAID controller Supports RAID 5 and 6 (as well as other modes) Supports UEFI (GPT) Fast processor Seems very stable
Well, after having this card for 6 months I can understand now what is all this noise abour "hardware RAID". This card is running great with 4 Hitachi's 7K3000 3Tb drives in RAID5. Very fast, reliable and most important it's great at protecting your data. RAID5 combined with "patrol read" gives me great deal of confidence (but please don;t forget about backups). It spins drives down when not in use, if there is a failure it will send an email in addition to audible alarm.
Tri-Mode connects SAS, SATA, and NVMe storage with one adapter
Very fast. Did I mention it is fast. My CPU is fast, but this allows my CPU to not do any RAID parity calculations. Also, this has 1 GB onboard cache which does help with some file transfers. I mainly need fast sequential reads/writes with large files. Supports PCIe 3.0 and backwards compatible, which is good because Sandy Bridge CPUs do not support PCIe 3.0 :-( Future proof as these support 12 Gb/sec or excess of 1.2 GB/s if you have PCIe 3.0. My HDDs are too slow to take advantage of the speed, but it has helped in the RAID 5 though. The SSDs on it are insane.
Fast Easy to use GUI and BIOS Port expander compatible Tons of configuration options / RAID levels / informational alerts
- Paired with a decent CPU, can push an array of SSDs far past most other controllers. - A relatively cheap way to get into 8 ports of 6 GB/s SAS/SATA.