12G External PCI-E SAS/SATA HBA Controller Card, Broadcom's SAS 3008, Compatible for SAS 9300-8E

it works well as advertised and it comes in IT mode, its fast and it doesnt get as hot as other say but who knows parity check up is an ordeal with unraid

Out of the box this worked with Truenas SCALE.The 6 new drives I added came right up, no issue at all.No need to flash or anything. Literally plug and play.Bought this with 2 SFF-8643 to SATA connectors, and plugged those into my WD red pros. The SFF-8643 to SATA plugged right into the two slots available, and that extended me out to 8 total drives.

Put two of the in my unraid server 6.12.11 Os found and loaded cards like plug and play. just added cables and i was good to go.

I should firstly say the card looks new and legit and it was detected no problem. However when I installed TrueNAS and attempted to create a pool of 5 drives it seemed as if two of the drives were faulty. One always blames the drives first because maybe they were damaged in transit. But I was wrong. Through a process of elimination (swapping around cables between drives and ports on the card) I was able to establish conclusively that of the 8 breakout ports the cards supports, 3 are not operating properly. Unfortunately for me, it took a while before I was able to get all the components and build this system so it appears I am just outside the Amazon return/replacement window. While I do currently only need 5 working ports, it makes me uneasy that there may be some other issues and my data is worth more than the card. I'll probably be looking at other options for replacement.Update: Amazon sent me a replacement card that is working without any issues. The supplier was also prepared to do a replacement, which I appreciate. So all good here. :-)

The card arrived promptly. in a sealed box. I checked firmware on it and was current. Unfortunately when i tried using the card it proved problematic. It would hang going into ROM config utility. it would also only see some of the drives. Os kernel was reporting firmware issues. i confirmed that my cables are fine using a different card. I spent much time testing the card on multiple servers and they all experienced issues. Ended up returning it and buying LSI Broadcom version

Advertised as IT mode, but mine came in IR. Just used instructions found online to flash using sas3flash to 16.00.12.00 and good to go. Added a baby Noctua NF-A4x10 FLX with some zip ties to keep it cool.

Good choice for low-end internal storage, like home NAS with gigabit connections. For file systems like ZFS you don't need HW RAID, HBA is a best option. In addition, I would recommend NVMe PCIe SSD as a file system cache (ZIL/L2ARC in case of ZFS, or LVM dm-cache).Works well if you need to connect 4-8 HDDs. Usually, sustained data transfer rate for modern consumer hard drives (SATA3, 7200 RPM) is about 250 MB/sec, so with PCIe 2.0 speed 250-500 MB/s per lane, this controller is able to work effectively with up to 8 HDD or 3 SSD with 6GB/s SAS/SATA interface (SSDs have transfer rate ~550 MB/s, so x4 PCIe 2.0 bus would be bottleneck for even 4 SSDs).PCI 2.0 x4 bus is a bottleneck for this controller, which blocks from using it in more serious tasks, rather than low-end home NAS.The only disadvantage with this seller is missing cables. LSI 9211-8i for that price usually comes with cables. Good SFF8087->4xSATA cables may cost you additional $30.Right now I hasn't been able to test device, waiting for cables to arrive... Will update later.

The HBA came in IR mode. I flashed it to IT mode via an EFI bootable USB stick. The benchmark image is for an attached Seagate SAS 20T hdd under linux. You might get better results with 8x but it's certainly usable at 4x. Anyway, I'm happy with this HBA.