I agree, but on this one im cautiously optimistic it may be real LSI, as the packaging in the ebay picture is the exact same packaging that i see in a review done on a site of the 9271-8i (they had full unboxing picts) and included in the sealed anti static bag is the LSI manual (also like in the review's unboxing picts) so im hoping!! it comes tomorrow, ill def be updating here with the results of my now 3rd attempt at getting a working LSI card via ebay
)
to recap:
1st one was DELL oem (9265-8i), came in not booting to a BIOS error, doing a mode0 flash bought the card alive, but its 1gb cache seemed to be fully dead (would not show up, nor did i have the raid 6 option).
card 2 (9265-8i) came in fully DOA
card 3 - is a 9271-8i sold as brand new sealed, and comes in tomorrow! (friday)
Hey! I do not want to give you some bad news, but I own a LSI9271-8i. I love the card, but it has some.. features.. to be aware of.
It runs HOT. And I really mean HOT. If you plug it in a case, just to power test it, it will climb to 104-115C in a matter of a couple of minutes. It needs active cooling. I had to Macgyver a 8000RPM 40mm fan to mine to get the temps down. It runs at 55C all day with the fan pretty much blowing across it. You need to take this into consideration with that card. The price you paid is good, I spent 625$ on mine.
Also, this card does NOT like Sandforce SSD's. Well known issues with this card, and many other SSD's too, notably Samsung. I had a S3500 hooked up to it, and it worked ok but the performance is slow. In the GUI it will tell you that SSD Cache Setting is disabled. This means, the write cache on the drive itself is disabled. Writes will be pokey. I had two Sandforce 256GB drives in RAID 0 (HyperX) on there, and instead of getting ~1GB/s on writes, it managed around 250MB/s or so. I did the same configuration on my internal SATA connectors, and got almost 1GB/s in RAID 0 to them. So, just be aware that it is not friendly to SSD's as it could be. The firmware has gotten much better in the last couple of releases. I'm also using mine in a 8x PCIe 3.0 slot.
And.. if you use this on Linux, driver support, is there, but, don't expect many features exposed.
On the flipside, the card does deliver some very good performance numbers. I happen to have a Supermicro 846E16-R1200B SAS2-846EL1 that holds 24 drives. I created a RAID 60 with 22 Seagate 1TB ES drives, and on burst writes, I will get 2.1GB/s. Over my 10Gbe iSCSI to that same enclosure, I will get 990MB/s read, and 860MB/s writes. So, the card does run very well. Random IO is not bad either with large queue depths.
I have a couple LSI9260-8i's, and they run cooler, and the performance is not bad. They are the 512MB versions, and I cannot complain there. As noted in the forums and with a Quick google search, they are relatively cheap and plentiful. The performance is also good. I have 8 WD Greens (yes, those ones!) in a RAID 5, and in over 2 years, never had a drop out or problem. I do a lot of archiving, so, for my copying, I get 950MB/s on average writing to the RAID 5 set from the 9271-8i card in the slot beside it.
Food for thought. I hope you had a better purchasing experience. I've never had that kind of buying karma on eBay before.
GL!