Pros: I have 20+ disks attached to this card via a chenbro SAS expander and have no problems running in JBOD mode. I run an older opensolaris distro (ZFS) with the mpt_sas drivers and it's very stable. I ended up making my own nylon spacers to fit this into a PCIe slot. Not a big deal. I've upgraded the firmware to the latest I can find - works great.

Cons: The heatsink gets a little hot, looks like it could easily be replaced (upgraded) since it's only held on by plastic clips. This card is likely made to be used in a streamlined server case with high airflow so the size of the heatsink is probably not designed for other form factors.

Pros: powers up, hot-swappable, temps are decent, supports the smartctl scterc command. supposedly enterprise ready.

Cons: high Load_Cycle_Count values as reported by SMART tools. i'm running this drive as part of a ZFS raidz2 on solaris (running on a *relatively* low traffic server) and the drive is constantly parking/unparking. linux users appear to have a workaround for this via hdparm and disabling the drive's power management but that tool does not run on solaris. my ratio of Load_Cycle_Count:Power_On_Hours is incredibly high.

Overall Review: my drive array has 2 flavors of seagate drives, 2 flavors of WD drives, and samsung drives. none of the other drives have this problem, only the toshiba.