9300-8I LSI SAS3008 12Gbps SATA/SAS 8-Port HBA IT Mode ZFS FreeNAS unRAID+2*SFF-8643 SATA Cable

I've had this in production (home lab/NAS) for ~6mo and it's been chugging along in proXmoX and TrueNAS with zero issues. I don't know what more to say. It didn't require any out of box firmware rewrites, just an update to make my sensibilities feel better, and I did strap a 40mm fan to the heatsink since it's sitting in a standard tower case rather than a noisy rack box.

I opened the package to find that the heatsink was only partially mounted. I found the second retention mount in the box. It looks to be broken.

Not sure why, but this card doesn't illuminate. BIOS takes very long to post, I hear the drive spinning up then shutting off immediately. Looks like the firmware is corrupt. Returned it.

I am fairly new to homelabs and running my own servers so I had no idea about these little tools. I was wracking my brain trying to find how I was going to plug all the drives I needed. This was my solution. I will be buying bigger ones in the future to accommodate more drives as I plan on having around 20 drives for my main storage. If you're on the fence, just try it!

Worked for a few days, hope it didn’t destroy my $3600 SAS drives. Not too sure why this particular card failed in such a short time. The card does run hot. When the card worked, it worked just fine in an unraid setup on some 15GB Samsung SAS SSDs. After light uses, it failed. There is a spot under the heat sink where some SMD components can touch the heat sink and short, possibly vibrations could have caused this, poor design.