LSI Broadcom SAS 9300-8i 8-port 12Gb/s SATA+SAS PCI-Express 3.0 Low Profile Host Bus Adapter

I purchased this card from Amazon as there isn't really any options for this that I could find here in South Africa. I got the card as I was building up a server of sorts in my old PC case and wanted to stuff a lot of hard drives into the case (it takes 13 drives total) so that I could get to grips with Windows Server Storage Spaces, maybe TrueNAS ZFS skills etc. The motherboard I'm using has 8 SATA ports, but 4 of them are SATAII speed only and everyone always sings the gospel of these Host Bus Adapters, so I decided to purchase this one.The shipment was pretty fast from the USA to South Africa. The package itself was wrapped well enough, though there was some denting and deformation to the exterior packaging. However the card was protected well enough and was in pristine shape. The included CD is pretty badly out of date and the documentation isn't super helpful, but it was all included as was the low profile bracket.The card itself has worked in my limited use so far with no issues. It's pretty straight forward plug 'n play really. Plug card in, attach the SAS to SATA breakout cable and hook the SATA ends to your drives and Bob's your proverbial uncle.I would suggest using this card in a case with some airflow over the card as I have read it can get quite warm under heavy use. Other than that, all I can say is that to me, this card was well worth the money since I couldn't find anything similar available to me locally that didn't cost perhaps twice as much.

Brilliant! It just works right out of the box for a TrueNAS system. No configuration necessary. PlugNPlay in a Dell Precision 5820.

Works great, support was great as mine did not include the correct faceplate. They were fast to ship me a new faceplate. Got it up and running in IT mode for my TrueNAS system and have had zero issues with it since.

My use for this was to utilize a hand full of SAS drives I acquired with my windows machine. Had a little trouble getting windows 11 to recognize the HBA, thankfully nothing too complicated. There's no official windows 10/11 driver for it so you need to use the latest windows server 2019 drivers and after a reboot, the card is detected.Also....Grab yourself a 40mm fan to go with this card. This thing runs HOT. A couple 120mm fans blowing air over it does a poor job. At idle this card runs around the low 70c mark. Once you put on any sort of load it easily hits a little over 100c. with a fan directly attached to the heatsink, I'm comfortably around 40c at idle and 70c under full load.

Went with this card after getting significant read/write/checksum errors with a m.2 to sata adapter. Upon boot, no errors on any drive. Should have gone this route to begin with.

- Worked out of the box in a Lenovo TS460 server when plugged in to the factory drive cage- Built in BIOS recognized in the BIOS screens of the Lenovo TS460 server- TrueNAS recognized the controller without any issue~30 days later still stable- not anticipating any issues.

After trying to use flaky M.2 SATA cards and a PCIe 2.0 x2 SATA expansion card that prevented a new AMD AM5 motherboard from booting, I finally bought this SAS card and will never go back. It provides 8 SATA ports and, unlike the other SATA boards is actually bandwidth provisioned for these drives (overprovisioned actually for 6 Gbps SATA drives) with PCIe 3.0 x8. It was immediately recognized by TrueNAS 13 and has been running stably under high load for several days.

Older card but no problems at all with TrueNAS Core. Make sure it is in IT mode first. Mine was already. Using all 8 ports on SATA. SAS will be later on if needed. Bought 2 pack SF-8643 cables from Amazon sold by Cable Creation (by the way, they work great too).