Looks like a damn good card for the price.  If I had a need for it, I would get one.  It says linux drivers are provided.  Newegg http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115057

 

 

Model

Brand HighPoint

Model RocketRAID 2680

Specifications

Type SATA / SAS (Serial Attached SCSI)

Internal Connectors 2 x SFF-8087 mini-SAS

Interface PCI-Express x4

Transfer Rate Up to 3Gb/s

RAID RAID 0/1/5/10/50 JBOD

Operating Systems Supported Windows 7

Microsoft Windows 2008/2003/XP/ 2000/x64 Edition/Vista 32 and 64 bit

Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Open SuSE, Fedora Core, Debian

FreeBSD

Mac OS X

Linux Open Source Drivers

Dimensions 3.12" x 2.64"

Features

Features - TerabyteGuard –maintain RAID integrity with routine inspection of storage for defects induced by wear and tear.

- SATA and SAS hard drive compatible

- 128 max SATA and SAS hard disk drives via SAS expanders

- Multiple SATA/SAS RAID sets

- Multiple logical unit sizes and RAID levels on one card

- Bootable RAID array support for greater fault tolerance

- Variable stripe size for performance tuning by application

- VSS (Variable Sector Size) for over 2TB single volume in 32bit OS

- (SHI – Storage Health Inspector) S.M.A.R.T monitoring hard drive status for reliability

- Bad sector repair and remapping to reduce dropped drives

- Disk scrubbing to prevent degraded RAID arrays and increase uptime

- SMTP for email notification of RAID array information

- Spin down Idle Mode reduces power consumption and increase drive longevity

- Automatic RAID rebuild when new drives are detected

- Staggered Drive Spin Up

- Online Capacity Expansion (OCE) increases storage capacity without data loose or compromise

- Online RAID Level Migration (ORLM) transforms RAID levels to meet storage protection or performance requirements

- HighPoint RAID Management Suite (HRM Suite) – Complete configuration management suite

- Easy to use Web GUI, CLI and BIOS Management

- Drive activity LED support

- Array/Drive Status and drive identification

- LED support enclosure management via I2C and SGPIO

- Hot-swap

- Hot-spare

- RoHS compliant

Packaging

Package Contents RocketRAID 2680 host adapter

Low profile bracket

User Manual

Driver CD

(2) SFF-8087 mini-SAS cables

Looks like a pretty good deal... although I haven't been able to find if someone has tried this card with unRAID yet.  I went ahead and ordered a couple, guess I can always have some "fun" figuring out how to make them work if they don't work out of the box.

I would recommend waiting on this.

 

I would surmise the kernel will soon be compatible with the the LSI supermicro 8 port SAS/SATA card.

I believe we are just waiting for the kernel folks to fix some internal routines.

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=3109.0

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2711.0

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118100

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816101202

http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AOC-USAS-L4i_R.cfm

http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AOC-USAS-L8i.cfm

 

yeah, I'm not in any rush. My current system is at 7 drives with 2 more on the way.  I knew getting the SAS cards may have problems but it is worth the gamble given the price/product.  Do you know if the Highpoint runs an LSI chip? I've not been able to find out.  Also, since the card already has Linux drivers I might temporarily put them in my test system if/when I run into issues.