Hello,
First off let me start off with why I’m selling it, because I believe this card is worth something to someone, just not everyone. The card works just fine, the model is an Adaptec 2258300-R PCI Express SATA / SAS controller, better known as a SAS 51245. It was the HBA for many of my SATA disks in my zpool for a very long time. The reason I’m replacing it is simply because the FreeBSD driver likes to panic the kernel when the card’s kernel doesn’t want to respond, which seems to happen from time to time when it can’t talk to a non-redundant single disk “raid0” volume or if it got too hot (the chassis it was in didn’t have strong airflow toward the rear). A typical ZFS, or any software RAID configuration for that matter, is to tell the RAID controller that you want no redundancy and let the software implementation handle the parity. This particular card with my particular OS would not respond back to the kernel when it couldn’t recover a data block. That being said, I haven’t updated the firmware on it in a couple of years and it may have better luck in more commercially adopted OSes (Solaris, Linux, Windows, OS X, etc). It also didn’t have this problem very often, and it may have done better with disks with TLER disabled and the controller BIOS handling the volume management. I did indeed pay a pretty penny for this card ($680), and for 8 SATA lanes it provided a lot of throughput and a lot of connectivity. I’ve since replaced this card with two separate LSI SAS2008 based cards that provide true AHCI passthrough to the OS.
This card I’ll let go for $200 with some spare SATA breakout cables that came with the replacement controller (they won’t work with a backplane, however, as they combine power and SATA into one piece to plug into the drive). I do not recommend this card for use with software RAID, however if you’re still a strong believer in hardware RAID or have a machine with an OS that doesn’t offer a viable alternative (Windows), this card will probably be valuable to you.