Question 1

Can it be used with mainstream motherboards? Because most of them seem to not support the use of non-graphic cards on their PCIE 16x slots...

Accepted Answer

This is a function of the bios or chipset the card would have no effect on this. This controller is fully pcie compliant so it would work without issue if the board allowed it.

Some bios have a preference setting for onboard gpu vs pcie you can try to make sure you set this to onboard first and make sure you are running the latest bios update.

if it fails due to the board you can try to use a pcie 4x slot if you have one.

Hope this helps.

Question 2

I just purchased  the LSI00296 9266-8i MegaRAID controller to use with two new Samsung 840 SATA III SSDs. The MegaRAID® SAS Device Driver Installation User Guide (Rev. E, January 2011) contains the following statement "MegaRAID provides drivers for the MegaRAID SAS RAID controllers, which bring up to 6.0 Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI and 3.0 Gb/s SATA II performance to host adapter, workstation, and server designs."

The specifications on this site say a 6gb/s card.  The specs on LSI's site says "•Second generation 6Gb/s SATA+SAS with unprecedented levels of performance."  I'm hoping that the docs are just out of date.

Does anyone know if the 9266-8i is 3gb/s SATA II or 6gb/s SATA III???

Thanks,
Tom Steele

Accepted Answer

Both statements are the same.  This is SATAIII and will step down to SATAII when the drive or cables don't support it.

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