ADAPTEC - 16-Port SAS/SATA RAID Controller 71605 - PCIe 3.0 x8 - RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, 60

No installation instructions, no disc, no online support. Returning as soon as possible.

Decent card, with caveats. I'm running this card in a linux based system (debian) and it works pretty well ONCE you fix it's firmware. If you get a card with firmware 7.6.0, downgrade it. That firmware doesn't exist on Microsemi's website. It only goes to 7.5.0. How I figured out the 7.6.0 had issues was when I got an expander. The controller would randomly lock up or just go permanently asleep. This wasn't an issue without the expander, so I removed it just to see if things got better, and they did. Once I upgraded the expander firmware (which I couldn't in Arch linux btw), I tried again. Things were a bit better, but still not quite right. I found a forum post that said 7.5.0 was the last version that wasn't OEM. I downgraded this using a USB boot drive with their web UI software, and behold, after that it's been working perfectly fine with the expander. (The expander is also an Adaptec one.) So yes, this card works great. I don't use it in HBA mode (which it supports natively BTW) because ZFS doesn't like more than 6 or 7 drives (I tried this briefly with truenas, and it was stupid slow). I'm running 20 with the expander + 1 spare. Once you get the firmware downgraded (If yours has 7.6.0) it works great. Otherwise, be warned.

Use this adapter for my file system with 16 hdd. Works well out of box. However when I tried to build raid 5, it stuck at building/verifying raid array and while verifying, the read write speed are super slow...thought this could be a driver issue but I tried and problem still there. Support guy told me it could be due to one bad hdd which I don't think so. Fianally I said screw it and use HBA mode instead. It works great...superb speed and all my drives functioning well. Not sure what happened...

Does it's job as a raid card just fine. Came without the pcie slot bracket. also, it gets very hot and needs good airflow, when it overheats it makes a really loud high pitched beep. Took me a while to track down where the sound was coming from. Most of the driver and utility packages for linux are really old and a pain to get compiled on modern linux, although that doesn't stop it from woking.

INFO SOURCE: Microchip [dot] com Subject Matter: Adaptec RAID 71605 Adapter RAID 71605 Status: Discontinued [Verbatim in Part] “ ... Adaptec will no longer provide support via phone or email but limited information may be available on our website...” ADDITIONAL WARNING: Shipped with NO cables. RECOMMENDATIONS: Need a robust 16-port SATA III RAID Controller Add-In-Card (AIC) for a PCIe 3.0 bus slot. Look for an AIC that is NOT discontinued and that has NOT been sitting on a shelf in a warehouse collecting dust for several years. Discrete electronic components like Capacitors can dry out altering the required capacitance value(s) and also introducing intolerable errors causing Equivalent Series Resistance (ESR).