External PCI Express SAS/SATA HBA, SAS2008 Chip, X8, 6Gb/s, Same as 9200-8E

Repurposed an old X79 PC as a storage & VM server running Arch ( linux ), needed SATA 3. This card worked out of the box, six Seagate Ironwolf drives attached, zfs read speeds fast enough to saturate a 10Gbit connection ( and sufficient to use it as a Steam game library, actually - access times are obviously dire compared to local drives but for games that read most things in one go, it's great ). I can't remember if it was just plug & play or I had to install a driver ( I believe it's included in the kernel ) but whatever it was was not paintful enough to make me remember.* Don't recommend Ironwolf - they're getting increasingly errorprone just as the warranty expires* Don't get cheap SATA breakout cables.* I haven't felt the need to fiddle with firmware so I have no idea how easy it is to find something compatible - there is a driver package somewhat buried on 10Gtek's site but that appears to be it.

This is an LSI 9211-8I made by Avago Technologies (Singapore) owned by Broadcom in the US. Arrived with with firmware FW Revision 20.00.07.00-IR. If you intend to use it in a TRUENAS or UNRAID server, then you need to erase the firmware on it, before flashing an IT version of the firmware onto it, so that the disks pass through without the card's bios trying to inflict its h/w raid on your disks.You can use Rufus to make a freedos bootable disk. My EFI mainboard didn't like DOS and complained with a "Failed to initialise PAL", so you either need to find an old motherboard (before EFI) or run an EFI shell and the EFI flash utility instead). Only 3 files are needed though - just google it - 2118it.bin, mptsas2.rom and the flash utility sas2flash.exe according to whether it is DOS or EFI you will use. It flashes both controllers on the board, so all is good.This card runs very hot (as it meant for an air cooled enterprise server), so a small fan might be required if you are running it on a home server. Don't forget to buy 2x 4-way SAS to SATA forward connectors if you intend to run 8 disks off this.

Good product. Does exactly what it says it’ll do.

Installed the "10Gtek Internal PCI Express SAS/SATA HBA RAID Controller Card, LSI SAS2008 Chip, 8-Port 6Gb/s, Same as LSI 9211-8I" earlier today in my Debian server for use in JBOD mode with ZFS, to replace a couple of cheap 4-port SATA controllers.I was initially worried that I would need to jump through some firmware upgrade hoops to avoid the on-board RAID functionality, but it worked fine out of the box - I installed the card, attached 8 SATA drives (mostly WD Red 4TBs) and they all showed to Debian as individual drives as I desired.I've only been using this card a few hours, so can't report on long-term reliabilty, but initial impressions are good. A "zpool scrub" is reporting 1.4GB/s for my pool of 14 drives (7 mirrored pairs). 8 drives are on this card, 5 are on the motherboard's 6-port SATA controller and one (due to my case being full) is in an external USB-3/UASP enclosure.Installing "sas2ircu", it's showing IR firmware v18.0.0.0.

Whilst it is not the most modern HBA there are newer in the LSI family, I had and older motherboard so needed something a bit older. This works perfectly well with FreeNAS I did not have to muck around reflashing it in to IT mode. It simply worked out of the box.The card is not the shortest card and with the connectors on the rear face you do have to make sure that you have enough unobstructed space behind the card. The heat sink on the card is not ridiculously large so it will all fit in the width of a single slot but I would advise good airflow to prevent overheating.

Bought this with SATA breakout cables because I didn't want to be limited by having drives connected to the mobo, connected it, worked with unraid and my drives immediately.Having never used a SATA controller before I was a bit worried there'd be some troubleshooting and flashing involved, but it worked great out of the box.

For the sake of tidier cable management, getting one of these was a no-brainer for me. It worked nicely with a pair of SAS SFF-8087 to SATA cables with my hard drives that all read without any trouble in Windows 10 Pro 1803 and no additional drivers were needed so it turned out to be an idiot-proof plug & play solution for me. Admittedly, I've only used this as a JBOD controller and not in any RAID configs but does the job for me.

plug n play on Win10 Pro 1809.