HP H220 (9207-8i) cards $48 OBO + FS

The listing & sticker on card say they are 9205-8i (PCIe2) but the chip is SAS2308(D1) which is 9207-8i PCIe3 card.
They've accepted $35 ea for 2 on my first offer.
Got the cards few days ago but just got to open them a little while ago. They do appear new bulk stock. At the time of the post they have over 260 in stock. Nicely packed.
Though these are already in IT mode, couldn't flash directly to 20.00.07. I used sas2flsh (P14 DOS) to erase and put P14 FW and then flashed to P20.

At $35 ( or possibly less) for new bulk, I think these are a better value than SAS2008 based used cards

New HP 660088-001 H220 2-Port SAS 6G PCI-E HBA SAS9205-8i | eBay

 

How many drives can single card support?

 

8 natively of course but I think w/ cascading/expanders up to 256 if memory serves me correct.

 

That's what i was thinking the 8 and 256. I going to go in for two and see what happens.

 

Or using HP expanders I had in mind a limit of 112 drives attached... (don’t know why I have that number in mind but seem to remember where I saw it documented by HP)

 

Seller accepted $33 each for 2 on first offer.

 

Heh, he gave me crap at 35, returned with 38 I said 35.01 and he accepted

 

How useful or important is that a card has onboard memory and battery backup?

 

Offer accepted for 3 @ $30 immediately.

 

so is this pci-3.0?

 

Well, this is a first!

 

As this is a PCIeV3 card, does it come with significant better bandwidth? Would I surpass 3.5GB/s with 8 SATA SSDs?

 

Quick! Counter at $28!

 

only if you use it with ir firmware and raid.
gor freenas/zfs you want it firmware and then cache and bbu is not used as far as I know

-Jannis

 

Counter at $25.

 

Thanks. That solves one of life's mysteries.

 

Haggled a bit, but he accepted 2 @ $30 each.

 

Wow! Someone bought 50 of these....

 

@gigatexal

Like I stated in my OP, sas2flsh shows this as 2308_2(D1) and flash to 9207-8i was successful. So this is a SAS2.1 (6gbps) PCIe3 card per specs below:

SAS 9207-8i Host Bus Adapter

 

@nthu9280 A very good find. Thankyou.