Pros: absurdly fast, tech support is very on-point, has low profile bracket. Drivers and firmware are straightforward and well supported across the board. used in multiple builds with SSD arrays (Samsung 840 Pro and Mushkin Chronos Deluxe), no problems, throughput is off the chart.

Cons: It needs on-board cooling, no exception. The card overheats in a workstation chassis. You MUST MUST have a high CFM PCI slot cooling fan just under this card to avoid overheat. You can never have enough airflow over this card. cant stress that enough.

Overall Review: Aside from the cooling issue, its the best card out there. The BBU and FlashCache are pricey though.

Pros: This performs about how you would expect from a high-end RAID card. It is noticeably faster than my old 9690SA-8i (SATA-2). Relatively inexpensive for a high-end card.

Cons: My first complaint is that this is a Cisco serial number, so support needs to be done through Cisco, and not LSI/Broadcom. As best I can tell, to get support from Cisco, you need a service contract with them, which is not free. My second complaint is that the card does not seem to want to enter it's boot-time management UI (with ctrl-h). However, it does allow me to use the CLI management tools, so I built my array that way. I'm still not certain how I feel about that, because checking for failed or failing drives is a LOT more work now. I am also unable to use the Windows MegaRaid Storage Manager. It fails to find the card using my local IP or my loopback IP. I presume this is because it is a Cisco serial number and not a LSI s/n.

Pros: Really fast 8 SATA III ports PCI-e 3.0 x8 1GB Cache

Cons: Runs very hot, needs very good air flow or a fan attached to it. With a fan attached, it might press up against other PCI-Express cards (has to be staggered).

Overall Review: My first REAL raid card after trying a few "Fake RAID" cards or onboard RAID included with mainboards. So far I'm very happy with this RAID card. It's very fast and was easy to setup from within Windows Server 2019. I don't run the OS on it, I just connect a bunch of drives in RAID 1 which are all in a Storage Space (seen as one large drive). I have 8TB, 4TB and 3TB drives connected and it's been working perfectly without issue. I had to buy the cables separate since this is the "single" model, opposed to the "kit" model which comes with cables (Forward Mini SAS 36P SFF-8087 to 4 SATA III). Also getting the CacheVault which is sold separate incase the PSU fails.

Pros: Easy to use software and configuration tools

Cons: Had to buy the battery backup seperate

Overall Review: Great buy price is reasonable