LSI LogicSAS9211-8I 8PORT Int 6GB Sata+SAS Pcie 2.0

Why did I wait so long to get this card?! I have been fudging around for a couple of years trying to use add-on cards to get good performance and reliable operation at an affordable cost out of a system with 10x drives arranged as Linux raid 1 and raid 10 arrays. This card cost only ~$20 more than PCIe-1x 4 port cards and delivers MUCH more performance while taking up a single PCIe-8x slot. I have all drives running at full SATA-III (6 Gb/sec.) speeds now with ZERO issues.I was worried about this card/driver combo recognizing my Linux software raid arrays - as to rebuild and restore these would take at least a week. This card recognized all the arrays straight out of the box! My card came with v. 18 IR firmware installed and based on what I had read up here and other places I expected I would need to re-flash the firmware, so I had downloaded the IT F/W v. 20 earlier and had what I needed on hand. The re-flashing process went without incident using a Freedos formatted USB stick with the necessary utilities.UPDATE:Just bought my second of these cards at a significant discount. The card functions flawlessly with v19 IT firmware running Linux software raid with card in JBOD (passthrough) configuration. A word to the wise - if running Linux S/W raid you will need the IT (not IR) version of the firmware and NOT the newest v20 - v19 is the best. v20 has documented issues when simultaneously reading and writing.

I ordered this product to address a problem with my RAID support for my Asus P6X58D Premium motherboard. The Included RAID on the motherboard couldn't support HDD's larger than 2TB. I was disappointed as I had just ordered and received two 3TB HDD's to be used in a RAID 1 configuration and couldn't realize their full capacity. I ordered the SAS9211-8i to address this issue and I'll have to say, that so far, it works great. Very fast and I'm now utilizing the full 3TB capacity.The only negative comment I have is that the installation and setup process is not well documented and it took me a while to get everything installed correctly. The best place that I found for support on the SAS9211-8i is: [...]When I ordered this item it was from Art Japan. I was in no hurry so I selected free surface shipping. The product arrived 20 days before the earliest projected deliver date so I was very pleased with the speed of the transaction.

If you read the reviews you'll come across a guide by boris_d for how to flash to IT mode.Just wanted to add a few extra steps for the trouble I ran into.First, prepare your USB drive to boot in UEFIThis will erase your USB drive or other drives if you don't know what you're doing, so be careful.Plug in your USB driveOpen command prompt as administratordiskpartlist disk-find your usb drive in the listselect disk #-where # is the number of your usb drive likeex: select disk 8clean-clean will DELETE all data on usb drive or other drive if you aren't careful selecting.convert gpt-This makes your usb drive of type gpt so you can boot in uefi modeexitexitNow create your fat or fat32 partition as boris guide shows and continue his guide.Another tip that got me stuck for an hour and was my computer's fault, but can hopefully help someone else out.Make sure when you download the Shell_Full.efi that your browser actually downloads the entire file.The filesize should be 754KB or 753KB.Not realizing this, I spent an hour trying to get a Dell T320 to boot to efi shell when in reality the issue was my browser stopped downloading and said completed at only 90KB.Other than that and wishing for a windows flashing utility, it works great.

I flashed my card to IT mode based on the instructions in the review mentioning the post "How-to: Flash LSI 9211-8i using EFI shell by boris_d". The broken link to Shell_Full.efi in the forum post can be fixed by replacing "master" in the URL with "91db774bf4b" to access the repository as it was on Jan 19 2017. I didn't end up needing this though, as my motherboard had a built-in EFI shell accessible through the BIOS. Once in an EFI shell, the rest of the instructions worked flawlessly.I've been running this for a few weeks now on an Ubuntu server box. No drivers were needed and it's been 100% stable. This card is a huge step up in reliability from the HighPoint Rocket HBA I was using previously. Would definitely recommend for the price as a JBOD card if you're happy to flash the card to IT mode.Note that the card is designed to have airflow over it, but it doesn't require much to keep it at a reasonable temperature.

I recently bought a used Intel Xeon server with 6 hot swap SATA bays for a song. Unfortunately I found out the hard way it came with a crappy Adaptec SAS RAID card that is incapable of dealing with soft RAID without marking the drives in its own proprietary way (you NEVER, EVER want to use hardware RAID. it's evil, trust me).I was hoping this card would be a drop-in and it was: I just unplugged the SAS connector from the old Adaptec card and discarded it, installed this one and plugged in the SAS cable. That's pretty much all there was to do: my old drives were recognized without problems and I was ready to go in no time -- and I have a spare SAS port in case I want to add external storage (although I'm only using two of the SATA lines to the expander cage).I've only been using it for a few days so I can't speak for its reliability, but in terms of capabilities for the price, it's a winner.Recommended.

This card had been reported to be compatible with windows 10 which is why I had purchased it.Unfortunately I did not install it right away (no time available) . This card does not even show up in the device manager and has NO WINDOWS 10 Drivers available on the Website. If you have Windows 10 and think this is going to work for you - DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME OR MONEY!