Pros: Bought a few years ago in anticipation of cheap 2TB drives, so I could grab 8 and raid them up. So far Its running JBOD of existing drives well, no issues, no fuss, no complications.
I like the dipswitch settings.

Cons: Why aren't hard drives cheaper yet?!

Pros: Back in 2012 I needed to expand the capacity of my old storage server and didn't have the money to go all out and buy new case, motherboard, etc. I came across this controller card and in having several 5.25'' slots available I also purchased a 3x5.25'' to 5x3.5'' drive cage, which instantly gave me 5 new slots for 5 more hard drives.
After opening up and installing everything, installing drivers, etc, it worked like a charm! It's not the fastest thing out there, my motherboard doesn't have PCI-e anyway, so for pure cold storage it's plenty fast and reliable.
I was also amazed I could run this controller in Windows Server 2012 R2, had a bit of complication with the drivers, but managed to get it to work. Running it with 4Tb hard drives and they are recognized perfectly too.

Cons: Over the years I upgraded my storage server to Windows Server 2012 and had a bit of a fight with the drivers. I think it's a shame Supermicro doesn't continue support for this controller anymore, and for a bit I thought I was going to have to get a different one. After looking around for answers I found that this controller card is driver compatible with the Sonnet Tempo Sata controllers, so if anyone needs to find a driver to get this controller working on newer OSes, look up on google for "Sonnet Tempo SATA X4i 4.2.0".
After installing those drivers Windows Server 2012 recognized it instantly and all my drives came online, I imported them and all data was there and RAID redundancy across drives maintained.

Overall Review: Some people reported this controller was not capable of handling large hard drives, but I have it hooked up to hard drives of 1Tb, 2Tb and 4Tb capacities and they are recognized without any issue.
I don't know if it's because I'm using the Sonnet Tempo driver, or if it's because it's Windows Server 2012, but larger hard drives had no issue. The only thing to notice is that with hard drives over 3Tb you have to convert them to GPT to get the full amount of space in one partition. Otherwise it creates a 3Tb partition and a second partition with the remaining space.

Pros: Great if you need lots of Sata Ports for Software Raid, Reliable, Easy to install

Cons: None! Only I wish it were hardware raid for this price :)

Overall Review: I've been running this for a few years now and it's been running without a hiccup.

Pros: Inexpensive for the number of ports, though I would have been happier if my m1015 worked. Works with openindiana without any additional drivers.

Cons: pcix (not really a con but something to be aware of) and 3gb/s, 6 ports instead of 8

Overall Review: The cons arent really cons, just something to be aware of as this is older hardware. Using one of these until I can get one of my 2 ibm m1015's working or a replacement, 6gb/s and PCIE would speed things up a good bit. Using a mix of hitachi and toshiba 3tb drives (total of 10) with zfs. was previosuly using with some 1tb drives, happy it worked with the 3tb's.

Pros: Well reviewed. Comes with 8 sata cables.

Cons: This is PCI-X which I'd never heard of until it arrived on my doorstep. I was attempting to build a 10 drive server machine out of my old hardware and my motherboard does not have a PCI-X slot.

Pros: Works with Server 2008, 2008 R2 and 2012! Does not conflict with onboard RAID or SATA.

Cons: Software only RAID, so it's limited to RAID levels 0/1/5.
PCI-X

Overall Review: I was having a tough time trying to get an Adaptec or LSI PCI-e RAID adapters to work on my new 2012 build. Both cards were a few years old, but I wanted H/W RAID and onboard memory. Neither of these cards played well with my onboard SATA. After 2 days of mucking around, I remembered I had this old card in inventory. Plugged it in and BAM! (after I loaded the Sonnet Tempo SATA Gen2 PCI-X adapter driver). Performance isn't as good as a full H/W RAID solution, but I was able to get the capacity I was looking for.

Pros: Worked right out of the box without any configuration hassles. Windows 7 doesn't have a driver for this card so I had to load it from the driver CD. After that it was smooth sailing installing Windows and configuring the applications on the machine.

The controller being PCI-X really makes a difference over PCI. Even with a single drive, performance is way better since you aren't bottlenecked to 133 MB/s of a regular PCI slot.

Cons: No hardware RAID support, but for this price with this many SATA ports I really can't complain. I think the only issue I had was the SATA connectors aren't secured to the card very well and require you hold the connector while plugging the drives in.

Overall Review: I bought this controller, along with a Western Digital Red 1 TB drive to breathe a few years of additional life into an aging Dell Precision 650 WS for a customer. It was pressed into service as a security DVR for IP cameras and is performing the task stellarly.

The customer is happy they saved money over buying a whole new server and I'm happy that it wasn't a huge headache to do, it was a win-win situation.

Pros: 8 ports, very cheap. good support in solaris/OI because the chipset was used by sun in storage appliances (x4500 i think?)

Cons: at least on the motherboards i've used, the pci-x bandwidth is a really serious bottleneck.

i found the linux drivers to be buggy. IIRC the device architecture split the 8 ports into two groups. there was a bug that would reset channels if you didn't have ports from both halves populated. there were other problems, one of them caused some data loss for me. this was maybe 3 or 4 years ago. switched to solaris.

Overall Review: with the 15 spindles i have attached to two of these, with an infiniband card on the same bus, i would see about a 4x throughput improvement just by switching to pci-e