Pros: Works out of the box with ESXi 5.0. Raid 10 with 8 drives that typically read/write at 90mb/s is reading and writing around 450mb/s. Fast! Comes with long cables that take care of your needs. You can attach your own LED's to the pins on the card to monitor activity, failures and cache. Battery available as a separate purchase to keep your write-back cache safe... buy the battery! Without using the write-back cache, your performance will drop significantly... up to 75% from what I've read. You can enable write-back without one, but a power outage will drop your cache data. If this is for a lab, maybe you don't care... but why play with fire? I'd hate to lose my Exchange VM due to the girlfriend plugging in a hair dryer and popping the breaker.

Cons: Sometimes difficult to get into the card after Post. Technical Support wasn't very knowledgeable when I had questions... but they were responsive. Most recent drivers (5.34 as of Nov 3, 2011) for VMWare aren't at the LSI site... you need to go to VMWare's support page and grab this: http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/dt_esxi50_lsi_2108_v534/dHRAYnRqZWRiZHAlJQ== It's located under "VMware ESXi 5.0 Driver for LSI MegaRAID SAS Controller." The ESXi 5.0 driver includes LSI MegaRAID SAS driver version 5.34. The LSI MegaRAID driver (megaraid_sas) supports products based on the 2108 and 2208 SAS ROC family.

Overall Review: While I may have some gripes, the card is amazing. I wouldn't consider shopping around for anything else. I just had to do a little extra leg work, but that's not a big deal. I'm using this with an ASUS P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 LGA 1155 Intel Z68 Motherboard. I think that remember people saying that this card has problems with certain mobo's... while this combo definitely works for me, it does act a little strange sometimes... the difficulty getting into the card after Post is what I'm getting at... I think that has something to do with the Mobo. Obviously, it's not a big issue since I've got it working no problem... and I would imagine that bios updates will fix this issue in the very near future. The mobo is brand new, and I really like it, but it has room to grow.

Pros: Audible Alert is awesome, and FRIGGIN LOUD. It went off on me, and woke up my entire house, one of my room mates thought it was a smoke alarm going off. It just works. I set up a RAID 5 array using the web bios in about 10 minutes. I love the fact this comes with all the cables you need. decent rebuild time, a 6TB RAID 5, with 4TB of data on it, took around 8 hours to fully rebuild.

Cons: no JBOD support I understand from a high level controller like this, nobody would really use it, but I have at least liked to see this as an option. A workaround is to create each drive as a separate single disk RAID 0.

Overall Review: I noticed the firmware on the drives in my array was out of date. (The firmware versions are listed at startup) So I went to the seagate website and downloaded the firmware updater. Luckily for me I only updated the firmware of one of my drives. I wanted to see if it work before updating the rest of my drives. Upon reboot, the audible alarm went off, and signaled that my RAID 5 array was in a degraded state. The controller then rebuilt the array automatically...which is nice. But I can't believe a simple firmware update would cause the controller to think a drive had died.

Pros: For the money, it's fast, well supported, and does what I need it to do.

Cons: Worst user interfaces I've ever encountered, both WebBIOS and MegaCLI. If you're not running Windows or Red Hat, you're pretty well stuck administering it from those two tools, and they are awful. But my biggest gripe is that you cannot migrate "hybrid" RAID types like RAID 10. This means if you have a RAID 1 running, and want to add a couple more disks to expand it as a RAID 1+0, you'd have to back up all your data, delete your virtual drives, and start over. Also, drive rebuilds are appallingly slow - migrating a two drive RAID 0 to a 3 drive RAID 5 can take, literally, days. When you're stuck doing this from WebBIOS, this means your server is offline for days. Luckily we only use this for a development environment (ESXi 5), so we can stomach the downtime and hassle. But I would not accept this in a production environment, unless I was on a super budget or had a lot of redundant systems and could afford to take some down for long periods.

Overall Review: If you're on a tight budget and don't mind some quirks or limitations, this will get the job done. If you've been spoiled working with equipment like HP SmartArrays or enterprise class SANs, you will be frustrated by it.

Pros: * Amazing customer service -- everyone had thought my RAID was dead forever, with terabytes of lost data, but LSI calmly walked me through diagnosis and got my RAID back to an online state, which let me recover all of my data! * Great performance even with complex encoding like RAID6 over 8 drives (when battery backup is online -- slow writes otherwise). * Worked reliably over 2 years.

Cons: * Battery backup didn't last very long (~2 years), so had to replace, which wasn't terribly cheap.

Pros: - really fast card, even when your array is full - SATA 6.0Gb on every port. Not that fake half speed Marvel Yukon Sata6Gb either. - works with some enthusiast boards, like my Asus P6X58 Premium... if you're really careful. read below. - bootable with multiple arrays - great knowledgeable phone support. (never tried online support)

Cons: - tricky to configure without QVL server motherboard - even trickier to boot off without QVL server board. see other thoughts. - HOT! why is there no fan? what is wrong with you guys? Had to buy PCI card slot fan to use in normal, home, non-server room environment. - no way to do background spinup of drives on boot, makes computer boot take a lot longer because it waits to spin up all the drives and checks all arrays before starting to load windows. - don't try to sneak a bunch of junk non-enterprise drives past this card. It's not a drobo, it needs the predictable smart reporting status and firmware of good solid enterprise drives. This won't just save you from pulling a "failed" Caviar Green once every 2 weeks, but will force you to purchase for maximum performance.

Overall Review: The problem I see people struggling with in the reviews for this card is option rom. Gamer motherboards don't have as much option rom as server motherboards. This card must require a lot of it. So you have to be very patient during config. In order to boot off the card, you need to access the bios level config screen for the card. Not having enough option rom causes the motherboard to ignore this request. I had to remove ALL onboard SATA devices and turn off extraneous devices in the BIOS (extra LAN, terrible Marvel controller, stuff like that), including SATA DVD drive. that got me to the Bios level config, was able to stripe a Kingston HyperX 240Gb SSD, and set it as bootable, next to my 6x 2TB WD RE4 raid6 array. Once you're done in the BIOS, you can hook up your other devices and manage all other features from LSI Megaraid Windows software. Turn off S1 & S3 sleep. If you let your mobo sleep with this card, it will appear stone cold until you pull CMOS battery

Pros: I am replacing a Adaptec 5805 controller with this LSI 9260. Card runs ALOT cooler than the 5805 and it works well with SSD drives. I have it running with 4 OCS Agility EX in a raid 0 and it runs FAST

Cons: Not to bad but the BIOS is kind of like a Web Interface. The default raid configuration is Raid 6, so make sure you change it

Overall Review: Overall a very nice card, and crazy fast with SLC SSD drives.

Pros: Works with non enterprise drives. The mega raid storage manager for windows is decent. Currently testing different raid 0 arrays using the Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX. 2 drives running raid 0 @ 64k stripe and short stroked to 600gb hits 250MB/s avg, max = 264MB/s, min = 244MB/s. Just ordered 4 more of the WD Caviar Black WD1002FAEX drives. 4 of these $99 drives in raid 0 should almost double the above numbers. Shooting for 4 drives in raid 0 + short stroked. 2 drives in raid 1 for backups.

Cons: The card adds a few seconds to OS bootup. -> To be expected... Doesn't come with the battery backup which is required to use the better caching option -> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118118 Its still a great controller w/o the bbu although I ordered one.

Overall Review: SSD's have yet to prove themselves in workstation or server environments. And frankly their just to small for the media I work with.

Pros: Card is solid. MegaRAID Storage Manager software is robust. Tech support is very good.

Cons: The webbios interface takes some doing to puzzle through. It raises the case temp a smite.

Overall Review: Installed the LSI 9260-8i in my unsupported Asus P6T Deluxe motherboard. After switching the MB bios to raid and making the LSI card bootable, I had no difficulty entering the cards webbios or moving aroung in it was a wireless Logitech mouse. and initilized raid 0 with two 600GB WD Velociraptors. Used Acronis with universal restore and booted successfully into Vista 64. After working through some driver and other sundry problems, I found that I was getting the same disk read speeds (benchmarked with HD Tune Pro) as before with a single drive. Friendly and knowledgable 24/7 Tech support suggested that I enable the write-back cache and that more than doubled my disk read speeds. One representative kindly invited me to call back any time. The LSI co-exists with the ASUS U3S6 USB 3.0 & SATA 6Gb/s Add-on card making it possible to add single hard disks to the system and use USB3. At least it did on my system.