So up until now I've been perfectly happy with my reflashed M1015 HBAs in my servers.
However I'm in the midst of rebuilding one of my storage servers. It's going into a 16-bay 3U from the 8-bay desktop it used to be in - primarily because it needs a few more hard discs to expand the array a little and give some spare capacity for the future. As a consequence, the LSI 9211-8i I'm using currently won't be enough to feed the 16 bays in the 3U.
The progeny of this system is that it's been transplanted from an NSC-800 case, and as such is a mITX motherboard, so I have a single PCIe slot at my disposal - thus doubling up on M1015's isn't an option without changing the MB (and despite the 5yr old motherboard and CPU there's absolutely no need to upgrade this from my POV - especially given the price of RAM and Xeon E3's these days). Naturally I refer to the stickied thread about OEM HBAs, and I see there are precious few OEM options for 16-port internal HBAs.
So my first thought was to start looking for cards like the LSI 9201-16i... but a shufti through ebay turns up a bunch of suspiciously cheaply priced models originating from China or Hong Kong. Spidey sense says that these are entirely possibly likely counterfeits, and comparing a few of the pictures offered shows a worrying disparity between heatsinks and the likes. Does anyone have any experience on the legitimacy of these? Being an EU-based kinda guy, restricting myself to EU-based sellers (almost all from Poland or Germany), I see that 9201-16i's are going for £400-600 which is... well, pretty expensive, especially for stuff that doesn't seem to be brand new (given that this is a pretty ancient HBA by now).
Hence my call out to the forums. Is it worth taking a chance on a £120 card of unknown provenance from China? Should I splurge on a barely-below-list-price card from the EU, hoping that it's not just someone selling a counterfeit card? Or are there some other bargain options (such as reflashing an OEM card I might have missed) that forum members can recommend?
(My previous considerations to a new 16-port HBA was buying a board like the X10SDV-4C-7TP4F which comes with a 16-port HBA onboard... but it's £600 plus the cost of new RAM, and if I'm going to buy a new board I may as well just use two 9211-8i's).
However I'm in the midst of rebuilding one of my storage servers. It's going into a 16-bay 3U from the 8-bay desktop it used to be in - primarily because it needs a few more hard discs to expand the array a little and give some spare capacity for the future. As a consequence, the LSI 9211-8i I'm using currently won't be enough to feed the 16 bays in the 3U.
The progeny of this system is that it's been transplanted from an NSC-800 case, and as such is a mITX motherboard, so I have a single PCIe slot at my disposal - thus doubling up on M1015's isn't an option without changing the MB (and despite the 5yr old motherboard and CPU there's absolutely no need to upgrade this from my POV - especially given the price of RAM and Xeon E3's these days). Naturally I refer to the stickied thread about OEM HBAs, and I see there are precious few OEM options for 16-port internal HBAs.
So my first thought was to start looking for cards like the LSI 9201-16i... but a shufti through ebay turns up a bunch of suspiciously cheaply priced models originating from China or Hong Kong. Spidey sense says that these are entirely possibly likely counterfeits, and comparing a few of the pictures offered shows a worrying disparity between heatsinks and the likes. Does anyone have any experience on the legitimacy of these? Being an EU-based kinda guy, restricting myself to EU-based sellers (almost all from Poland or Germany), I see that 9201-16i's are going for £400-600 which is... well, pretty expensive, especially for stuff that doesn't seem to be brand new (given that this is a pretty ancient HBA by now).
Hence my call out to the forums. Is it worth taking a chance on a £120 card of unknown provenance from China? Should I splurge on a barely-below-list-price card from the EU, hoping that it's not just someone selling a counterfeit card? Or are there some other bargain options (such as reflashing an OEM card I might have missed) that forum members can recommend?
(My previous considerations to a new 16-port HBA was buying a board like the X10SDV-4C-7TP4F which comes with a 16-port HBA onboard... but it's £600 plus the cost of new RAM, and if I'm going to buy a new board I may as well just use two 9211-8i's).