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I bought one of these for £20 because it was cheap and now they're going for £7!! The cables for these cost more than the card! With the right cables you can hook up normal SATA drives or SAS drives. The SAS drives are also cheap, I picked up 4 for £24 so I could experiment with the different RAID levels 0,1,5 etc. RAID is great, RAID is fantastic, everyone should have RAID but there are a few caveats. These cheap P400 RAID cards don't understand drives larger than 2GB but they will allow you to make several drives into a huge Volume which your OS will see as a big fat drive to be formatted. The latest CENTOS 7 does not work with this card until you say hpsa.hpsa_allow_any=1 in the grub. Took me ages to figure that out. Works fine in Mint 19 though. There is a sweet spot in price and size for arrays built with old gear off ebay. Don't expect to build a 12TB system on the cheap with old drives because when it comes to value for money new 4TB drives are the best value per GB and this card will only see 2TB of them. If you build the right size sized array using SAS drives then it should be fast and cheap. The SAS drives spin up like jet engines which is excellent if you believe computers should sound impressive. You can do everything you must to with this card by pressing F8 when it shows up during P.O.S.T. However there are some nice tools from HP that allow you to explore the options properly from a graphical user interface. I was able to get it on a USB stick to boot. In testing I was getting a good speed from my array of about 200MB/s using hdparm -t /dev/sda2 However the same drives in Linux software RAID MDADM I was getting 500MB/s (5gb/s close to max SATA III) By comparison the same test on an NVME drive gave 2200MB/s (22gb/s) If you really want speed then using SAS drives and RAID cards is messing about in the past. It's good fun and still the best way to store huge amounts of live data safely but it's not for ultimate speed.Read full review
Verified purchase: No
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