Pros: Bought this to attach two Coraid SR1521 RAID shelves to a Sun X2200M2 server running CentOS 5. Previously, I was using a Coraid NAS appliance. Read speeds went from ~50 MB/s to about 200 MB/s after using this board, since I can now bond two gigabit network links per RAID shelf to give me increased throughput. Also useful was the ability to set the MTU to 9014 - and match the MTU of the NICs inside the SR1521.

Cons: Increased server temperature slightly, but this is to be expected.

Pros: Small

Cons: Doesn't work with my Dell XPS13. I tried it with several monitors, and it only seems to work with one of them when the screen resolution was set to 1024x768. Even then, the image on screen had artifacts (tearing and odd moving patterns). Not sure if this is an incompatibility or just a bad component.

Overall Review: The same XPS13 works fine with a similar adapter from a different vendor. That adapter explicitly mentions that it is an "Active" adapter. I noticed if the adapter is plugged into the laptop MiniDP port with no VGA monitor attached, Windows switches to 1024x768 resolution. It stays this way until I plug in a monitor, when it switches to the correct resolution.

Pros: Works fine. Using it to connect a piece of external equipment to the building LAN. The switch to which it connects reports no dropped packets, over a ~100ft multimode fiber. Comes with the LC multimode fiber SFP, a plus.

Cons: None.

Pros: Works well, wires individually sleeved. All-black color improves the looks of an all-black interior case.

Cons: There's no overall sleeve over the entire cable. This makes it easy to get the wires tangled. It would have been nice to have an overall sleeve.

Overall Review: I used this inside a server to extend the molex power over to a USB3.0 expansion card.

Pros: Works with CentOS 6.5 (Kernel 2.6.32). Tested with an external USB3 disk drive, works well.

Cons: Power connection required, and this messes up the look of the insides. This went inside a large server chassis (Supermicro 6047), and I needed a Molex extension cable to hook up to a power supply.

Overall Review: Uses the NEC/Renesas controller chip.

Pros: Bought this to interface to a 24-drive SAS backplane in a server enclosure. It works well with CentOS Linux (kernel 2.6.32), both for drive access and to do enclosure management (ie, make the backplane LEDs work). Drives are hot-swappable. Fast. PCI-express 3.0 means that it will never be the bottleneck, even when using all eight SAS links flat-out.

Cons: Boot times increase. Not sure why LSI's option ROMs take so long to start. Not a big deal for a server that stays on 24/7 though.

Overall Review: Note that this is an HBA, not a RAID controller. It does not do RAID5/6 on board, it's simply a way to talk to your SAS drives. Bought this to build a storage server. Using a Supermicro 6047 24-disk chassis. The server runs CentOS 6.5 and uses ZFS. bonnie++ benchmarks on a raidz2 array with eight 3TB Seagate 7200 rpm SAS disks gave about 540 MB/s sequential write, about 600 MB/s on read. The 4-link interface to the backplane would likely be a bottleneck once all 24 slots on the backplane are populated, but that's still more speed than I'd need for now.