Review on LSI Broadcom 9300 8I PCI Express Profile by Matthew Watkins

UPDATE: I originally gave this unit 2/5 stars. I have left my original review below for posterity. I'm running Linux on a 4.9.6 kernel with the mpt3sas driver (for this card) version P13. From what I've read, the card firmware and host driver must match for the best and most secure performance. I flashed my card to P14 (see below) and encountered major problems. It took a bit of effort to downgrade it to P13, but I managed it (including booting a FreeDOS machine that didn't have UEFI). In any case, I have since exchanged the card again, having received it before P13. The postcard was fantastic! This is significantly faster than my old LSI card that used mpt2sas, around 6x faster in most cases. I am very impressed with this card and am now happy to recommend it. OLD RATING: I rarely rate things negatively. I have experience using this card in my daily work as we supply some of these cards in our devices. However, this one is for the system I have at home and replaces an older 2008 LSI model (Dell R620 chassis). I'm running Linux (4.9 Gentoo kernel) with a 10 disk ZFS RAIDz2 array. Although this card is much faster than the previous one it replaced (12 Gbps vs 6 Gbps), it quickly began corrupting data across the ZFS array. Luckily ZFS was able to find and fix all CRC errors, but that was on all drives. I tried updating the card's firmware and BIOS to version P14 (the latest on the LSI/Broadcom support site) but the data was still corrupted. Please note that I have 18TB of data on this array so I can't afford to lose it. In the end I sent the old card back until I dared to try it again, possibly with a different firmware (P13). If I can get it to work without data corruption, I'll happily change my 2-star rating to something better.