LSI LogicMegaraid Eight-Port 6Gb/s PCI Express 3.0 SATA+SAS RAID Controller LSI00330

Not new didn't even come in a box. Low profile bracket was loose in package and fell out when opened.I would expect a LOT more for the $200 price tag. First picture shows a cache module, but it doesn't come with it.I'll be avoiding this company in the future.

TL;DR up top: If you're looking for a high performance hardware RAID option, don't be afraid to spend the cash on this product. It just works. You'll love it. Read the updates for how it does handle failures.I just finished building a new desktop that I hope to last a few years before it needs to be replaced. MSI Z87 XPOWER motherboard, i4770K CPU (water cooled for future overclocking), R9 290X GPU, 32GB RAM, 256GB SSD OS drive, 6x3TB HDDs for storage and shoved it all in to a Cooler Master COSMOS 2 case. Everything about this system screamed except the HDDs. The 3TB drives were previously in an external box attached to a Highpoint RocketRAID card. The performance was crap at best (seriously, avoid Highpoint stuff at all costs) and the drivers crashed regularly.For this build I decided to bring the drives back internal, which is why I picked the MSI Z87 XPOWER because it has 10 6GB/s SATA ports on board, and the case to fit them in. I configured the 6x3TB drives in to a RAID 5 array using the on-board Intel RAID controller. While restoring data to the array I found that after a few minutes write speeds would slow down to as little as 4.5MB/s. So after abandoning that idea I tried to set up RAID Within Windows directly. No dice, Windows 8.1's RAID 5 is lacking (as in, non-existent, at least by default and software alternatives just didn't seem to exist.)Enter the LSI MegaRAID 9271-8i / LSI00330. I decided to get serious with my storage and I wanted a card that would scream and would not be a bottleneck in my system. This card is it. I wanted a card that could support at least 6 drives. This paired with a couple of the "3WARE Cable, 1 Unit Of 1 Meter Multi-lane Internal (SFF-8087) Serial Ata Breakout" cables gets you 8 drives. It's PCI Express 3, but will work in a PCI Express 2 slot if that's all you have.The 9271-8i with 6x3TB drives configured as RAID 5 gives me write speeds of over 600MB/s.On top of this, I also added the LSI LSI00297 CacheVault Accessory. I picked this up at the poultry site because it wasn't available directly from Amazon and the resellers here had some crazy prices. It was advertised as "for 9266-4i and 9266-8i" on that site but if you go to LSI's site directly (lsi.com) and search for LSI00297 you'll find it's compatible with the 9271-8i just the same. The CacheVault Accessory is, basically, a block of NAND flash and a big capacitor and it's used to backup the on-board 1GB cache RAM in the event of a power failure. This means you can rely on the RAM to store your data instead of having to wait for writes to disk, which greatly increases write speeds. You don't *need* this, you can force the 9271-8i to trust cache RAM anyway, but you'd want this in a power failure situation.Back to the 9271-8i. LSI's website, lsi.com, is easy to navigate and finding/downloading/installing OS drivers, management interface and firmware updates is dead easy. Within minutes of powering up I had updated the default OS driver, installed their management gui and flashed the latest firmware to my card. The management gui (Windows) is a joy to use and if you know enough to know that you want to set up RAID 5 then you'll have no problem using it. If you don't want to or can't use the Windows GUI then you're still in luck, there is a BIOS interface to do the same thing, it's just not as pretty.Windows 8 has no problem seeing the logical drive that I created and initializing/using it as expected. I suspect 7 would be just the same.The card itself is small, the SFF-8087 cable ports come out of the end rather than the side which makes it easy to manage the cables inside your system. The card is short too, so it won't interfer with drives or their cables in a normal ATX case.If the card gives me any problems I'll be back here to update. If this review is still sitting at 5/5, you know it's still working great :)UPDATE: 2014-01-04 - small issue.I am running an array of 6x3TB SATA drives and today one of them decided to go unresponsive. This caused the alarm on the LSU card to activate (it's VERY loud!). Once I figured out a drive had failed I shut the server down to investigate which physical drive was failing. I shut down as I didn't want to risk pulling other drives while the array was already degraded. Once I located the drive and reseated it's cables I tried to power the system back up, but it wouldn't start. It just appeared dead. The array is not a boot drive, but I wasn't even getting that far, it wasn't even POSTing correctly. After lots of attempts at rebooting/resetting the only thing that worked was to disconnect the LSI00297 CacheVault capacitor and fully power cycle. This did allow the server to POST but the RAID BIOS didn't load, so, no array. After another reboot the RAID BIOS came back and all disks were once again accessible. Very frustrating.On the plus side, once I reactivated the drive in the MegaRAID Storage Manager it came back on-line and reported no errors. Of course I'm running a manual consistency check, but over 6x3TB drives it estimates just 5 hours. The old on-board Intel RAID would have taken literally 100 hours to do the same thing.I still rate this 5 stars. A drive hiccupped, but there was no data loss.UPDATE: 2014-06-08 - moar drives!I'm still very happy with this raid controller. I've since added a 7th 3TB drive. I found the Windows 8.1 limits you to 16TB partitions. The other ~400GB is just hanging out there.. I'm going to add an 8th drive to complete the set but I think I'll convert to RAID 6, since I can't use that extra space as part of the 16TB partition and the drives I'm using (Seagate Barracuda) seem to like to die frequently.(Edit: Speed test results removed, Amazon lost the images?)UPDATE: 2018-08-21 - OH NO!! But, okay!!Since 2014 I've replaced all the drives with 8x6TB WD Reds, switched to RAID 6 and have been happily running a 32TB partition. Upgraded to a new machine and Windows 10 in 2015 without any issues until today.So after not using my system for 2 weeks (I was out of town), I came back to find the RAID card non-responsive, the virtual drive on it not available. After turning the system off and pulling the card I found the problem immediately, the heatsink had come disconnected from the main controller chip. It hangs upside down in the system so the heatsink pulled away and it looks like the raid controller just fried itself, the card is no longer working. Probably doesn't help that the exhaust of a GTX 980Ti is pointed right at it. Bummer, that card was 5 years old now and had been serving me well. I immediately jumped on-line to find a replacement that could be shipped overnight. I tried ebay, they had cards in the $180 range shipping from China in 2 weeks.. not good enough and even the chance the card was fake anyway. I came back to Amazon and this listing is still here, shipping PRIME next day for $280. Worth it. Immediately ordered it and the replacement card was at my door in 18 hours.I moved the CacheVault and battery over from the old card, reconnected everything and powered it up. Oh no.. I expected to be prompted to import my foreign config, but instead the card just showed 8 drives and no logical drive in the BIOS. Once booted in to Windows 10 I tried to start the MegaRAID Storage Manager but found the driver for the card wasn't working either, and couldn't update. This turned out to be an unrelated Windows 10 Update problem which took some time to fix, but once I got past that and I was able to get the driver loaded the card sprung to life, found the old virtual disk and brought it on-line. One of the drives was marked as degraded, it was probably being written to when the old card went offline. Being RAID 6 I'm not concerned about this though, it's currently rebuilding the drive and estimates 24 hours to complete it (remember this is 8x6TB drives in RAID 6).5 years after I originally purchased this card, I'm still very happy with it and it's performance. I'm probably going to pick up another one and keep it as a spare just in case I can't find a new one 5 years from now and I need to replace this one :)

I purchased this card and currently have it in a standard system running 5 x WD Red 4TBs. After doing a bit of searching on the internet it became clear to me that these cards run hot from the factory. I removed the factory heatsink and thermal paste. It was some of the nastiest stuff I have seen used. I replaced it with some quality silver thermal paste and then mounted a small fan to the heatsink and placed it back on the board. The temp literally dropped 50 degrees and runs like a champ now. The reason for the 3 star review is that a customer should not have to solve a heat problem on a raid card. LSI needs to up their game and put small fans on these cards. The entire modification cost under 30.00.

I would give more stars if this product was more clearly identified as a barebones / no instructions / no anything product. I had to spend WAY too much on the LSI website looking for drivers. And, the instructions in their documentation is ... weak.The product itself performs very well; but, it's hot and I won't feel comfortable until I can get a heatsink fan installed.

The price was almost too good to be true. I expected to get a used product that was badly packaged. What I got was a brand new card in retail packaging, complete with documentation and all accessories. The card was also already at the current firmware level. This is my first hardware RAID card, so I'm still fairly low on the learning curve and experimenting with options, settings, etc. Also, as noted in many other reviews, this puppy runs HOT, HOT, HOT. When first installed with other cards immediately above and below it (admittedly significantly limiting airflow), it was running idle at 80' C. Yikes! After rearranging the cards a bit, it still had a card above it, but nothing below it. That reduced the idle temp. to about 65' C. Still too hot for my comfort level. I added a fan (inexpensive, Best Buy Insignia NS-PCF1250) on a bracket that attached to 3 PCIe card screws and placed the fan perpendicular to the PCIe cards, so it was blowing directly on the cards. That lowered the temp. to about 51' with an active load (rebuilding several drives).Bottom line - a great card for a newbie as long as additional airflow is provided. I should note that the airflow requirements are very clearly listed in the listing and documentation, so it's not like it's a surprise that it runs hot and needs additional cooling.

So far, I've been extremely impressed with this product. Access times are fast, and the Windows admin tools are simple for anyone with RAID administration experience (despite a few UI annoyances, and the apparently inability to save local login creds).There was one issue regarding slot placement for me (ended up having to swap my Graphics Card and this card to get it to be recognized), but as far as I can tell that's due to a bug/issue with my motherboard and not in any way this card's fault.If you're tired of dodgy SATA cards stressing you out with their unreliability, and want something more independent than software raid run by your OS, this spend the bucks and get this card.Note that although my card was purchased sealed and new from a vendor here, it did not come with the splitter cables needed. I purchase two of CableCreation Mini SAS 36Pin (SFF-8087) Male to 4x Angle SATA 7Pin female Cable, Mini SAS Host/Controller to 4 SATA Target/Backplane Cable, 1.0M and they've worked great so far.

Does run hot. Heatsink is fire to the touch. Rigged a small fan blowing directly on the heatsink to reduce temperature by ~20 degrees.