Lsi Logic 179356 Controller Card 05-25703-00 9305-16i 16-port Sas 12gb/s Pci-express 3.0 Host Bus Adapter Single Pack

Driving 12 HDDs in my 2U chassis. Firmware update was easy, also easy to configure via lsiutil. Great card. I will never buy any HBA's other than LSI.

Terrific so far. Came up and recognized by Linux OS immediately. Significant speed improvement over motherboard SATA ports. Very happy.

Replaced a Highpoint card with this one for a FreeNAS setup. Works great! No issues so far but I'm still just breaking it in.Have 16x 8TB HDDs attached to it. Tested hot swap and rebuild in RAID10 type mirror on FreeNAS and works great.

TL;DR : Firmware update was needed from 13 -> 16, do NOT update the card Bios.Purchased here and sold by Aeon Micro, Inc., received the card and running sas3flash -list in TrueNAS will show the version of the Firmware and if it is in IT mode. Here are the relevant parts of that, showing that it is on old version 13 when version 16.00.12.00 was released in December 2020 -Firmware Product ID: 0x2228 (IT)Firmware Version: 13.00.00.00NVDATA Vendor: LSINVDATA Product ID: SAS9305-16iBIOS Version: 08.31.00.00UEFI BSD Version: 13.00.00.00Board Name : SAS9305-16iI wanted the current Firmware Version, which is 16.00.12.00, so downloaded the firmware from broadcom, Legacy items, Legacy Host Bus Adapters, Firmware, which was this file - SAS9305_16i_IT_P.bin - and flashed via `sas3flash -c 0 -f SAS9305_16i_IT_P.bin` which flashed but hung the adapter, after reboot it was on proper firmware.If you're using this in TrueNas, DO NOT UPDATE THE BIOS! The Bios doesn't matter, it is used if you are not in IT mode and you want to boot from one of the disks attached, which I did not and you probably don't either. I made the mistake of updating the Bios (from 08.31.00.00 to 08.37.02.00, and UEFI from 13.00.00.00 to 18.00.03.00), which caused TrueNAS to pause on boot with error:MPT BIOS MPT BIOS Fault 02h encountered at adapter PCI(01h,00h,00h)Firmware Fault Code: 2668hPress any key to continue…To fix that, I needed to clear that bios completely using the command `sas3flash -c 0 - o -e 5` which unfortunately wouldn't run in TrueNas. So I needed to find a USB drive, format it with FAT32, download Shell.efi from the tianocore edk2-archive ShellBinPkg for x64, put it at \EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.efi on the USB, then put sas3flash.efi from the SAS3FLASH_P15 package, sas3flash_udk_uefi_x64_rel directory at the root. Once in Shell, shift wouldn't work with my keyboard, so I needed to type : then arrow left, then fs0 to get `fs0:` to select my usb drive (map -r to show drives). Once there, I could run sas3flash.efi -list or any other command, including the command to erase the bios, after which sas3flash.efi -list showed -Firmware Product ID: 0x2228 (IT)Firmware Version: 16.00.12.00NVDATA Vendor: LSINVDATA Product ID: SAS9305-16iBIOS Version: N/AUEFI BSD Version: N/AFCODE Version: N/AIt was a journey. If it just came with the version 16 of the firmware, which was released in December 2020, I would have spent a lot less time getting this card to work and be on current (4 years old) firmware.

I recently got this card to drive a 16 Bay Expander Backplane. The same case has two hot swap 2.5" 15mm SAS/Sata bays. The four SFF-8643 connectors proved to be plenty since an expander backplane is being used. The backplane has five SFF-8643 connectors and has a built in expander so I used the 5th connector to drive the two hot swap 2.5" bays and this controller sees and handles them all perfectly and doesn't break a sweat.I also own a 9305-24i which as two more SFF-8643 connectors where the notch in the heatsink is. Both cards have the same SOC and heatsink but this one only has 16 ports but still has 24 lanes so it does not have the limitations a standard 16 lane 16 port card would have. Out of the 16 ports, 4 per SFF-8643 connectors, eight of them can be doubled as some drives have dual capability. In my case I am using 18 drives but the expander backplane takes care of the extra two ports needed using two out of four ports on a single SFF-8643 connector, no need for a card with more ports. These cards are intended to have air moving across the heatsink as they would in a real server case. For other uses one may need an aux fan to move air across it. It's a server card and designed to be in a server case plain and simple.What I meant by the last of the Dual Mode controllers from Broadcom is that their controllers that superseded these are tri-mode, SAS, SATA, and NVMe. There is a new interface called the U.3 that SATA, SAS or NVMe drives can plug into so the same controller and backplane can be used for all three in the future but for now, Ill be using spinning SAS drives for a while yet. I do not know how many U.3 backplanes even exist yet so the 9305 series will do fine for years to come.

I passed this through in Proxmox to a TrueNAS Sclae VM and had no issues; I've since moved TrueNAS to bare metal in a new (2nd) server that doesn't need this so it's still in the original and being used for zfs pool in Proxmox.

Using it in an HP DL380 G7 FreeNAS system. Works very well. No complaints. Plugs right into my drive cages with the proper cables.

Perfect HBA for home NAS servers. Fully compatible with Linux and exceptionally fast. Highly recommended.