Pros: Great Raid card that's extremely Quick (would be perfect for lots of SSD's) Easy to Setup

Cons: Requires airflow of chip or it will run hot.

Overall Review: This was the first time that I'd used Hardware Raid instead of using software raid 0 or 1 in the years past. I built an HTPC with the hardware specs below. One thing to keep in mind is this card requires air flowing over the heatsink and it won't passively cool with just the heatsink. I had read a bunch of raid card reviews on other high end raid cards that mentioned that high performance raid cards have a Linear Flow Rating of air that needs to pass through the heat sink . Without this movement of air the card will run very card and it may in fact damage it or it may throttle back the performance. I booted my rig up and installed the LSI software and I started searching for a chip temperature. After about 10 minutes I found it and was shocked when it was already up to 92 C. I powered it down and sat a 140 mm Cougar fan I had next to it and it drops the temperature down to 60C. Part of the issue was the raid card was sandwiched between my sound card and video card. Even with removing all but my raid card it still easily reached 80+C. Being that I want to keep my video card, sound card, and my raid card in an mAtx board it presented me with some issues. I thinik I've found a solution using a pci extender high speed flex cable hooked to my sound card and mounted further down in the case, but I wont know until I receive the adapter. As far as cooling goes, you need to have a fan mounted on the raid heatsink or a fan in your case blowing directly on the heatsink. I purchased some Noctua 40mm and 60mm fans to make an adapater and mount them to the card. I haven't mounted them yet but plan to in the weeks to come, for now I have that 140 mm fan jammed in the case which is cooling fine so far. I think one 60 mm fan mounted basically right on the lsi heatsink would provide enough cooling or maybe two of the 40 mm fans would. My PC consists of Intel I7-4771 MSI Z87M Gaming (mtax board) Crucial 16gb DDR3 1600 Crucial M500 512GB SSD 6 Western digital 4TB Red's in Raid 6 EVGA 750 TI Creative X-FI Xtreme Gamer Sound Card Fractal Node 605 HTPC Case 2 Corsair SP120 Quiet Fans (intake) 1 Fractal Node 120mm Fan (Intake) 2 Silenx 80mm Fans (exhaust) Now for the Raid 6 Specs (Running 6 WD Red 4tb drives) via CrystalDiskMark (1000MB) Read Writes Seq 884.5 MB/s 552.8 MB/s 512K 73.98 MB/S 443.4 MB/s 4K 1.097 MB/s 29.56 MB/s 4K QD32 13.95 MB/s 6.489 MB/s