LSI MegaRAID SAS 9361-8i

excellent card for the money. these are bulletproof and the backwards compatibility is awesome. upgraded from a way older card and it immediately recognized the old array without fuss.

Do not buy if you are using these in servers. I have had 2 of these fail in the last 6 months. I have never had a single LSI device fail like this in the past. I am assuming at this point, based on other reviews, this is not an LSI device; most likely cloned junk from China. This is incredibly frustrating when this happens because it puts my client's servers and my servers in a vicarious position, and potentially causes harm to business and data. I have used this RAID card in simple noncomplex ESXi platforms. See pic below to show the 2nd time that the RAID Card doesn't show Datastores it is assigned to manage.

Both the RAID card and BBU arrived quickly and with no issue. I wasn't sure if this would be a brand new or refurbished card but it was new. It didn't not come in the original box but did come in the factory sealed clamshell. RAID card and BBU work perfectly!

Super easy to manage and use. Runs about 85C though. Only have 4 HDDs hooked up in a standard PC case and a few virtual machines running on it and the card never seems to cool down.

They are NOT as described. They did not have either of the pictured brackets. They do not have licensing to support RAID levels 5, 6 & the associated spans 50 & 60. They only support RAID levels 0, 1, & 10. These OEM cards are not firmware-compatible with Broadcom’s publicly available firmware. I returned these cards because they are overheating. The first card initialized the RAID array, and then, about 2 hours later, it overheated and failed to respond (as listed in the logs, it entered low power mode). The second card overheated during Array initialization.

Fast, worked instantly.

I have also used the Adaptec raid card , I much prefer the Adaptec storage manager ease of install into windows over this, though there is a youtube video on how to do it, its far from plug and play, if you are ok just using the bios at startup to do your configuring then this probably ok for you, I have both windows 10 and 11 on the same machine using windows boot manager to boot up into either one, but in that scenario there is no opportunity to use ctrl-R to get into bios and check status or configure , ( for some reason) anyways, personally I'm going back to Adaptec to have easy access without hassle to get into storage manager in windows environment.

While it worked, this was a lamed controller with no RAID5.