LSI Broadcom SAS 9300-8i 8-port 12Gb/s SATA+SAS PCI-Express 3.0 Low Profile Host Bus Adapter

I purchased this card from Amazon as there isn't really any options for this that I could find here in South Africa. I got the card as I was building up a server of sorts in my old PC case and wanted to stuff a lot of hard drives into the case (it takes 13 drives total) so that I could get to grips with Windows Server Storage Spaces, maybe TrueNAS ZFS skills etc. The motherboard I'm using has 8 SATA ports, but 4 of them are SATAII speed only and everyone always sings the gospel of these Host Bus Adapters, so I decided to purchase this one. The shipment was pretty fast from the USA to South Africa. The package itself was wrapped well enough, though there was some denting and deformation to the exterior packaging. However the card was protected well enough and was in pristine shape. The included CD is pretty badly out of date and the documentation isn't super helpful, but it was all included as was the low profile bracket. The card itself has worked in my limited use so far with no issues. It's pretty straight forward plug 'n play really. Plug card in, attach the SAS to SATA breakout cable and hook the SATA ends to your drives and Bob's your proverbial uncle. I would suggest using this card in a case with some airflow over the card as I have read it can get quite warm under heavy use. Other than that, all I can say is that to me, this card was well worth the money since I couldn't find anything similar available to me locally that didn't cost perhaps twice as much.

Excellent card for TrueNAS

- Worked out of the box in a Lenovo TS460 server when plugged in to the factory drive cage - Built in BIOS recognized in the BIOS screens of the Lenovo TS460 server - TrueNAS recognized the controller without any issue ~30 days later still stable- not anticipating any issues.

My use for this was to utilize a hand full of SAS drives I acquired with my windows machine. Had a little trouble getting windows 11 to recognize the HBA, thankfully nothing too complicated. There's no official windows 10/11 driver for it so you need to use the latest windows server 2019 drivers and after a reboot, the card is detected. Also....Grab yourself a 40mm fan to go with this card. This thing runs HOT. A couple 120mm fans blowing air over it does a poor job. At idle this card runs around the low 70c mark. Once you put on any sort of load it easily hits a little over 100c. with a fan directly attached to the heatsink, I'm comfortably around 40c at idle and 70c under full load.

Forgot to post this review back when I first bought it in 2020 so here it is. By the way It's been working great for 6 years non-stop! I bought this adapter to add the fastest possible drive controller to a new file server PC I was building. Eventually I will get identical enterprise grade hard drives (most likely SAS) to use with this adapter. 8 drives will be used and 2 spares if I have failures. I built this file server mostly for consolidating many external USB drives that I used for backups and media storage. I want to have this file server last me basically forever so in the future I will spend some hefty cash on getting good drives like HGST HE8, HE10 data center drives or something similar. Anyway back to the adapter review. This is an original LSI adapter not clone. See my pictures. It uses the SFF-8643 cables If you are looking to connect SATA drives to it. You will need 2 cables to connect 8 SATA drives. The cables I ordered are CableCreation Internal HD Mini SAS (SFF-8643 Host) - 4X SATA (Target) Cable. One thing I overlooked when purchasing this adapter is that my power supply only had 6 SATA power connectors so I ordered a splitter and those work excellent. Once I taken care of my power splitting issue I was ready to add drives. I started out with 8 SATA drives I had laying around and they were all different sizes and brands. No problems whatsoever and I was able to see SMART data for all drives without any problems. This adapter is not a RAID controller but can be used with various file server software that offers RAID option. I also have to mention is the heat generated by this adapter. It needs good airflow in the case. I added a fan to constantly blow air onto it and it's been working fine. Many reviewers including myself mentioned the heat but that is normal considering the performance capability of this adapter. This adapter can run 8 SATA SSDs without speed problems. I recommend a YouTube channel "The art of server" for an excellent source of information about different SAS/SATA controllers. I based my decision to buy this adapter from watching videos on that channel. According to "The art of server" channel I have future proofed my file server as this adapter is both reliable and very fast and is able to handle 12 Gb/s speeds per channel which is much faster than any SATA hard drive currently available. I do not plan on using SSDs with mine but want to have unrestricted capability of adding SSDs if I decide to in the future.

After trying to use flaky M.2 SATA cards and a PCIe 2.0 x2 SATA expansion card that prevented a new AMD AM5 motherboard from booting, I finally bought this SAS card and will never go back. It provides 8 SATA ports and, unlike the other SATA boards is actually bandwidth provisioned for these drives (overprovisioned actually for 6 Gbps SATA drives) with PCIe 3.0 x8. It was immediately recognized by TrueNAS 13 and has been running stably under high load for several days.

works as expected. No issues on a supermicro server motherboard.

Works great, support was great as mine did not include the correct faceplate. They were fast to ship me a new faceplate. Got it up and running in IT mode for my TrueNAS system and have had zero issues with it since.

The order was delayed a bit, but it is expected as it comes from outside India. But the product was working good. I posted questions to seller, he responded on time. Overall it was good experience. I got my product in about 15 days.

Used in custom build for unraid. Worked out of the box. Didnt need to reflash or anything. Replaced a marvell based card that was throwing udma crc errors. Working perfectly at the moment, fingers crossed!

acheté en decembre 2025 retourné quelque jours apres car la carte ne correspondait pas mes besoins Juin 2026 toujours aucun remboursement

Very old firmware on the card, had to flash to latest. After that only works correctly with HDD, not with SSD's

Working as expected no issue for more than 3 months, I appreciate it if you can add an integrated cooling fan.