SUPERMICRO AOC-SASLP-MV8 PCI-Express x4 Low Profile SAS RAID Controller

Pros: None really other than it appears to work with 6 drives. Software drivers not easily found and installed. Also, complicated manual and many modes and firmware options.

Cons: Performance sucks! I purchased the card for its 6Gbps interfaces. However, in Raid 10 mode, the read performance is 250MBps, instead of 1GBps. I did not realize that this is not a real RAID card, allowing double performance associated with striping. The card is deceptively advertised, listed under Raid cards. Apparently RAID 10 reduced overall performance.

Other Thoughts: Don't buy for performance, only data security (if that)

Pros: Have two in a server.
Works flawlessly with Unraid. Controls 13 *2Tb drives.
Came with newest firmware.
Sped up the parity rebuild rate.

Cons: Dont know about Windows compatability, but apparently it works.

Other Thoughts: Might see if I can squeeze in another card :)

Pros: Works with Windows Server 2012 Essentials. REQUIRES v4.x driver (see review below for link to where you can get it - or email SuperMicro support). Supports 3TB drives with the new driver - firmware upgrade NOT required.

Cons: Somewhat annoying to have to search to find a driver. *shrug* not hard though.

Other Thoughts: Make sure if you're breaking out to single SATA connectors, you buy a forward breakout cable, and not a reverse breakout cable -- matters.

Pros: When it works, it works. 3TB drives - Yes, WHS2011 - Yes, 90+ MBps - Yes.

Cons: The current drivers were hard to find. And it doesn't work with 3TB drives without them. And this is why the 4 stars and not 5. Search on AVSforum, Renethx has a post with the working drivers. It came from supermicro, but it was in an e-mail. To see the posts go to avsforum, and add this extension: /t/1324649/3tb-drives-and-supermicro-aoc-saslp-mv8

Other Thoughts: You need to get a new driver to support 3TB drives. I couldn't find it on the supermicro website, which is why I told you about the avsforum post. But once you get it working, it seems to be fine.

Pros: Not enough to warrant purchasing.

Cons: This card consistently crashes under light load. I was copying data from one hard drive to another and it managed to crash and burn. I haven't tested this card on anything other than linux, but there are many reports of this happening around the internet.

Pros: This is a very inexpensive 8-port SATA card with (mostly working) Linux. I've run them for years in Linux file servers using patches from LKLM, but no stock kernel driver works under load. I've emailed the Marvell driver engineer and begged him to get the patches into shape for merging with upstream, but this hasn't happened during the past 2-3 years, and I'm swtiching to LSI.

Cons: Linux drivers *appear* to work, but under load they can *time out*. This can introduce *silent* data corruption (e.g., one bit error in a 1GB file -- enough to change the md5 hash, but not enough to be noticed by many applications).

Other Thoughts: I really had a lot of hope for this card under Linux, but have finally given up. The low-end LSI card is more than twice the cost, but it performs substantially better without annoying timeouts (or, with an unpatched kernel, data loss).

Pros: Took a chance and bought this card thinking it would work with ESXI even though there is another review stating this doesn't. I read some workarounds on Google and figure I could get it to work, but no luck.

Cons: Doesn't work with ESXI 5.1 or below.

Other Thoughts: Can't really judge the card as it seems like a great card, but haven't used it for anything but trying for ESXI. The desktop board I'm using sees it fine and hasn't given any issues for a pass-through and can even boot to CD with it. This is using a Marvel chipset.

Going to purchase the AOC-USAS2-L8i since I've read in some forums that is does work with ESXI 5.1 and it has an LSI chipset.

Pros: Card installed on Supermicro MoBo. System booted and card was recognized.

Cons: Took five days to format 8 750 HDDs in RAID 5.

Other Thoughts: Server is built and deployed, uptime uninterrupted. No problems to report.

Pros: Dropped this in a new unRAID box and it worked right off. 5 2TB drives and one 4TB drive showed up without any issue

Cons: Brackets a bit annoying, don't line up well when switched to full height...might just be my case however

Other Thoughts: The card came with the new firmware (.21) and was perfectly fine with my 4TB drive, have it mounted and in the array right now.

Pros: Product works
Provides decent throughput
2 ports for 8 drives

Cons: JBOD only (fakeRAID even)
Not a real RAID controller
No rhel6/centos6 drivers exist at all - built into kernel

Other Thoughts: Bought the card in a hurry because it was close to NewEgg's shipping cut off time, missed that its Software RAID (fakeRAID) only, and NewEgg didn't mention JBOD only - Software RAID allows you to build the setup you want to have though. Wish I would have looked further, however the card performs about average for being Supermicro and not real RAID