Controller Card LSI00301 SAS 9207-8i 8Port Internal SAS/SATA 6Gb/s PCI Express Single Retail

I replaced a basic SATA card with this SAS card because the SATA card was acting flaky. That's what I get for the price. This card has worked well without causing any random HDD errors. Plus, the ports support far more drives than it looks. You can split each of those headers to four or more HDDs using a SAS-SATA cable. I can't speak to data center use, but this will easily connect to more drives than can fit in a home case - even a full tower like I have. I run whatever the current version of Ubuntu Linux is at any given time and it worked out of the box. Zero configuration. UEFI BIOS sees the drives attached through the card, and Linux identified and mounted the partitions using GUID with zero changes after swapping to this card. The only thing this card lacks is RAID, but you really should be using software RAID or another redundancy solution anyway. Hardware RAID is (should be) dead. I highly recommend this card for a home server. It is worth every penny.

I purchased this card about a year ago for a FreeNAS server I have in my "home office". FreeNAS suggests an "HBA" only card (i.e. a card that does not have built-in RAID). This card is of the HBA type. Initially, my FreeNAS server had 6 x 4TB WD Red NAS drives in a ZFS2 (RAID with 2 parity drives, for 16TB net storage). Unfortunately, I was running out of space and needed to add another two 4TB drives. The motherboard I am using has 8 SATA connectors, so with 1 SSD boot drive and 6x4TB drives, that is 7 total. Needless to say, adding two more drives wasn't possible. Note: If you are familiar with FreeNAS, you know you can boot off a flash drive, but the speed isn't that great and I don't like the reliability of flashdrives for this purpose, so I chose a cheap SSD as a boot drive. MUCH faster on boot! No speed difference in operation. SSDs tend to be more reliable. You can do the cost/benefit analysis for your own needs/risk acceptance. I purchased this card because it was on the FreeNAS compatible list. I backed up my NAS to various external drives I have (FreeNAS didn't/doesn't have the ability to add drives to an existing ZFS RAID array, YET), installed the card, attached all 8 drives to the card, and, voila(!), FreeNAS saw the drives! I created the new ZFS2 array with all 8 drives, copied all ~15TB of data back to the NAS and everything has been working fine ever since. If you have a FreeNAS server, I can say, from my experience, that this card will work well. I cannot say how FAST it is compared to other cards, but it works well for my needs (it can handle a full gigabit network connection at full speed (105-112MB/sec with large file transfers and with ethernet's overhead)). If you have one of the newer 2.5, 5, or even 10Gb networks, then you might be able to saturate it. I can't with my 1Gb network. It has been 100% reliable to date (about 1 year so far). Recommended!

This is being used on an old Z170 Intel chipset to add extra SATA ports for a "RAID5" aka Windows 10 Parity storage space for 5, 6TB NAS rated HDDs. Unlike the simple "add SATA port" cards that only relocated the motherboard SATA ports to that card, this actually adds additional SATA ports. In my case, I moved the HDDs from the motherboard to this card. The drives previously used the Intel RAID5 BIOS. That provided a large 512 byte sector drive. However, to add a 2TB M2 drive I needed to use two of the SATA ports, thus the reason for this addition. I used Macrium Reflect to backup all the BIOS drives before the change to an external 20TB USB drive. I then restored the 1TB C boot drive along with the hidden repair partitions to the M2 drive. However, I did run into an issue restoring the large Z 20TB drive, as this new Windows partition used 8k blocks instead of 512. Thankfully Macrium lets you mount the Image as a read only drive, and as this was just used for data, there was no issue for special permissions. I then used Windows copy to copy from that image drive to the new Z drive. After a few days, it completed successfully. After a week it is working flawlessly. For the price it is the best solution I could come up for more SATA ports.

What we have here is an affordable SAS card, which means Serial Attached SCSI for those that do not know what SAS means (affordable means less than 100.00 USD). Mine came in a clamshell like packaging with no box. They claim that these cards are new, it's hard to tell as mine came in with all the labels and such intact (Some have reported that theirs appeared used). Further research of these cards yields (Google "LSI SAS2 2308 Mustang" - Which is what device manager sees this card as) that this is an OEM card, as I found the drivers for this card on a Dell support website as well as the HP support website (the latest drivers I could find for this card were Windows 8.1). This is not a bad thing, keep in mind that SAS cards can be very expensive if you were to buy these at retail as SAS is aimed more at the IT/Enterprise market. However also keep in mind that you MAY not be able to get Support from LSI (Broadcom) if this card were to fail on you. I'm not sure what kind of support you will get from the vendor other than the standard return to Amazon (if purchased from a fulfilled by Amazon, which is what I would recommend). What is the difference between SAS and SATA? In short, research has suggested that SAS has an advantage when it comes to multiple people accessing data on disk, SAS can both send and receive data at the same time while SATA cannot (SATA can only send or receive at once). Which means SAS is a good option for people looking to build a NAS system, but you MUST use SAS drives, if you use SATA to SAS cables, you are limited to SATA. Should I buy this card? If you are looking to add more SATA drives to your computer or want to build an affordable SAS NAS system, then yes. If you are looking for something faster than SATA, then a PCI Express to NVMe card might be a better option for you. The Good: Very affordable SAS card, SAS is a far more superior standard than SATA and is backwards compatible with SATA. Search Mini SAS to SATA on Amazon for adaptors. Yes, this has Mini SAS connectors on it also if you were wondering. LSI (its Broadcom now) if you are watching, there IS a market for affordable new SAS cards. Windows and Linux compatible, can't comment on Mac support. Tried on Windows 11 and Fedora Can support 8 Drives. Good for a NAS setup. The BAD: - This is not a Raid compatible card, it's called a HBA (Host bus adaptor), which means there is NO hardware raid capabilities on this card, not really a bad thing as there is plenty of software solutions around this, Windows, and Linux both have software implementations. I can't comment on if there is a speed difference between Software and hardware RAID. - It is only 6GB/s card, plenty good for the home market, not much faster than current SATA (see the difference between SAS and SATA). 12 GB/s and 22 GB/s are more recent standards, probably very expensive. - Support on this card is iffy at best, haven't had to use it yet. - SAS drives can be expensive. Conclusion: If you're wanting to make a NAS machine or simply add more SATA disk drives, then this is the card for you. It's much better than those cheap SATA cards out there and gives you a pathway to start using SAS drives in your computer or NAS. Overall, I'm very happy with this card.

LSI Logic Controller Card LSI00301 9207-8i 8Port Internal SAS/SATA 6Gb/s PCI Express. Used this HBA card, and a Mini SAS (SFF-8807) to Sata (SFF8087) cable to, to connect to a SAS drive I recently obtained. The card came configured in IT mode (non-RAID), and worked for the single SAS HDD i had. Asus P9X79 WS motherboard, having PCI express 3.0 x8 slots, and Windows 10 Pro.

The heatsink was discolored and the plastic container it came in had what appeared to be parts of leaves, and a small part on the pcie connector, but after cleaning it off it works perfect, just runs hot, so i have a fan on it at all times to keep it from overheating

Purchased this as part of my latest unraid server build. It was super easy and straight forward (plug and play) to install on the mobo, and connect up the 8 HDDs. I would honestly like to see this card closer to $100, but it's still great. Would recommend! I'm actually already considering an upgrade to the big brother version with 4 connectors since my server case has 15 drive slots...but for the time being I'll just make due with the remaining available mobo SATA connectors.

Works great for unraid. Have cache and storage drive hanging off it it