LSI LOGIC CONTROLLER CARD 05-25699-00 9305-24I 24-PORT SAS 12GB/S PCI-EXPRESS 3.

Terrific so far. Came up and recognized by Linux OS immediately. Significant speed improvement over motherboard SATA ports. Very happy.

Needed to add another array to a storage server but ran out of disk support so I purchased this card to replace another cheaper device that only supported 8 hard disks. Running TrueNAS RZ2 so hardware RAID was not necessary, just need a JBOD to see the disks. I can recommend this product as I have used it for two months and haven't had any issues. Old pool transferred without any special efforts even after I rewired my backplane to accommodate the new connector type.

Not reliable. I wanted to replace my 9300 16 port for the 9305 24 port support. The 9305 gets so hot that random read errors on various hard drives. I run Truenas Scale with multiple ZFS VDEV pools and if one drive fails in a pool, you go into degraded mode till you replace the marked bad hard drive. I had to swap back to using the 9300 for now till i find a cooling solution for the 9305.Provided you have the space, strongly recommend have fans mounted to the heat sinks.Updated: 4/19/2025 No more bogus HDD failures. For cooling, installed two 120mm fans directly above. Verified firmware is 16.00.12.00 for TrueNas use. Firmware updates can be found at Broadcom web site. Operating system TrueNas Community 25.04.0

To be clear, this is NOT a RAID card, this is an HBA. There is no hardware raid features in this card. That's exactly what I wanted. Cards like these are recommended for non-hardware raid applications like FreeNAS.Card build quality seems to be great, and software support is good so far (firmware/driver updates).

Expensive, but worth is. Bought a cheap card before nothing but problems. This makes my nas faster than my internal hdds.

I've had this card for a year. I purposely bought this card because it does NOT have raid built in as I use ZFS and BTRFS to use built in filesystem raid and sometimes MDADM, software in any case, so I do not use hardware raid. It is exactly as expected with six SFF-8643 connectors and can have the firmware upgraded with a linux tool. With anything scsi related which SAS is, the serial version of it to be exact, the controller is basically a co-processor and this particular chip that is the heart of this controller is a system on a chip (SOC). It is designed to have air moving across the heatsink as servers usually do pass a lot of wind through them, for special applications such as large media storage on an entertainment device that runs quiet such as a MythTV Frontend/Backend combo, an aux fan may need to be used to pull hot air off of it. It's a powerful card and WILL generate heat and if not enough air passes across the large heatsink, it will show messages in dmesg and system logs.These are dual mode SAS or SATA and the last of them as far as Broadcom goes. The cards that superseded are are tri mode which covers SAS, SATA, and PCIe through the new U.3 interface. I still use spinning disks for large arrays so this dual mode SAS/SATA controller will last me for some time yet.I switched to SAS drives in my array and should have done so a long time ago. SATA vs SAS is still the same old ATA vs the superior SCSI debate. SATA and SAS are just the serial versions which replaced parallel, SAS can do more things simultaneously like its predecessor SCSI. Of course the newer PCIe interfaces take that to a huge level with SSD drives. Whether SSD or spinning disc, please use drives that are deigned to run continuously, NAS drives as the minimum, you'll thank yourself later. The easiest way to have trouble is to connect 24 SMR SATA drives to it and try to set up an array. You will get drive faults even though the drives are fine within a day or so. ZFS does not like SMR drives and most of them are device managed so there is no way for the system to know it is dealing with a zoned drive unless it's a host managed SMR drive AND the filesystem can address zoned drives. I've never seen a HM-SMR drive personally but have decided to completely avoid SMR drives if using SATA. The switch to SAS enterprise drives made all the difference in the world even as a file server but I digress. You pay your money and you get your performance and longevity.

NOT a RAID card. Literally a JBOD that connects the disks directly to the OS.

I just want to comment that this is a host bus adapter (HBA) which is a controller for JBOD and not a Raid card. It does not say it is a Raid card anywhere. If you bought fish thinking it was chicken, you are bound to be disappointed. This is a great card for a large parity protected array like unRaid or FreeNAS.