Pros: Price.

Cons: I've got 2 SSD V300 drives that are performing significantly below their specs. They have been tested using synthetic benchmarks and real work load scenarios (in production server). They are performing more than 2 times slower than expected, with approx. 171MB/sec (read) and 70MB/sec (write) rates. I've owned a couple of the earlier model of the V300 that performed close to the expected rates, both in the benchmarks and in the real work loads typical to my server. The only difference I'm seeing in between the 2 sets of drives is that the older ones (that performed within specs) were made in Taiwan instead of China and had an older version of the Firmware (505 vs 506).

Overall Review: Drives have been tested using Synthetic benchmarks (AS SSD, HD Tune) and real work loads using my production server. I use numbers from benchmarks just as a reference, as different benchmarks use different methods and data sets to perform the tests and results might vary significantly. However, my most important test is the actual production server using real work loads. These drives serve as cache drives for an archive server and their performance extremely slow (often more than 2x slower) compared to the earlier V300 model or other brand.

Pros: 6 x SATA3 2 x NIC 1 x IPMI 3 x FAN connectors

Cons: CPU Fan Sensor not working when monitored from OS (tried from ESXi, Windows, Linux, even IPMI monitoring interface). CPU Fan Sensor works only from BIOS, where it shows proper RPM speed. Once machine boots any OS, RPM speed is not available for any health monitoring app. The other FAN Sensor is working fine all the time. It might be an ACPI driver issue in this case, as the sensor reports properly until an OS is loaded (an the driver from the OS is loaded). BIOS is updated to the latest (1.70) version Another issue I've found is with high CPU load under ESXi due to IPMI. Somewhere between 5-20 minutes after booting ESXi 5.5, even without starting any VM, the CPU load increases up to saturating one core (and power consumption increases with ~15watt) and stays like that until rebooting the machine. Disabling IPMI support in ESXi fixes the issue, but that is more of a work-around rather than a fix. Again, there could be another driver/firmware issue. I've contacted ASRock tech support for the first issue and waiting for a response.

Overall Review: Although it works, this server MB is not as polished as you would expect. Missing HDMI and Audio (yes, audio can be useful at times even on server MB) are inconvenient and the issues with the CPU Fan sensor and IPMI question the quality control process.