SAS9211-8I 8PORT Int 6GB Sata+SAS Pcie 2.0

Using these in two of my proxmox nodes with 8x 16tb Exos drives each (ZFS 2). Heavy use, always on. 8 daily users, surging to 22-24 several times a month. Streaming, AI workloads, gaming and game development, daily backups... just a lot going on, those platers are always spinning it seems. I bought extras just because I am old and have a habit of buying extras of anything that tends to fail, no issues in over a year of service. And in my experience in IT if its going to fail, it happens in the first 90 days or after 5 years.

Worked flawlessly out of the box in my TrueNAS / HexOS home NAS. Would purchase again if needed.

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 got this card to get more SATA III ports than my MOBO (ASUS P9X79 WS) provided and it does an excellent job of that. When I received the card, the directions were vague about how to install the driver. Adding to the confusion were directions for installing the driver during the installation of Win 7. I sent an e-mail to the manufacturer asking for clarification and, although they never did tell me how to install the driver, they did say that the driver needed to be installed during the installation of the OS only if I wanted to boot from the card. Since I didn't and I saw one review that said it worked right out of the box, I installed it and fired up the computer to see what would happen. Win 7 found the necessary driver for it and I didn't have to do anything else. The heat sink on the card runs pretty hot and I was concerned if it was too close to another card, the other card could be damaged and the heatsink might not get enough air flowing over it. I relocated the card from where I originally wanted it to the bottom PCIe socket (fortunately, it has eight lanes) so air would flow over it unimpeded from the front case fans and be exhausted by the PSU fan. Don't install this card where airflow is restricted, such as between two other cards, even though the cover is perforated. One thing I was concerned about was if the card was hot swap capable since nothing in the specs was said about it. I needed two of the SATA ports for two hot swap bays on my computer. I suspected the card was hot swap capable since one use is for servers in which it would be highly desireable to be able to swap out a dead HDD without having to shut down the server. I'm happy to report that it is hot swappable. It takes a few seconds for it to recognize a drive when first plugged in but, after that, it works just fine. All I have to do when I'm done with the drive is make sure nothing is writing to it, then pull it out. When booting up the computer, the UEFI gets interrupted a couple, three seconds in by the LSI card loading in its own BIOS, which takes a short while, then the UEFI has to start all over again before Win 7 starts booting. If I want to access the UEFI when first booting up, I have to wait for the LSI card to finish booting before I can get in. If I had to reboot the computer frequently, such as one or more times a day, the increased overall boot time would be a serious problem but I reboot only once or twice a week so I can live with it. While the computer is running, it's almost like the card isn't even there and the HDDs, both on board and in the swap bays, run like they are connected to the MOBO (better, actually, since I didn't have enough SATA III ports on the MOBO). I also have an e-SATA port connected to the card and it worked fine with an external dock.

The LSI SAS9211-8i card is what I'm reviewing. I have it connected to a Lenovo Expander board for my 16 SATA drives. My Asus Prime Z590A motherboard was a little picky with it; Eventually I was able to boot in CSM mode, access the card's BIOS and disable the boot option. After that I was able to boot in UEFI mode and all is good. I have the card in an x4 slot, as I have a gpu installed in the first Pcie slot. This took some patience with mobo BIOS; installing the card in the first (x16) slot, changing the slot speeds to x2, rebooting, etc, before I could install in the second slot (x4) and put my gpu back in the first slot (x16/x8), then changing the Pcie slot speeds to Auto. Note that the card is supposed to run in at least an x8 slot! For my SATA drives I'm getting max speed with the card in the mobo 2nd Pcie slot at x4 speeds however. I don't fault the card for any of the setup hassles but instead the Asus mobo BIOS. But through trial and error, no more boot problems and all is working fine. I'm monitoring the drives through the MegaRaid Storage Manager (MSM) which can be found on the Broadcom site. BIOS and Firmware on the card appear to be fairly current, although this is old tech. Windows 11 installed drivers that are working just fine. I'm happy with the purchase.

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!