LSI 9300-16i 16-Port 12Gb/s SAS Controller HBA Card with P16 IT Mode for ZFS TrueNAS unRAID

Bought to use in my TrueNAS setup and it worked right away. No setup, no drivers, nothing extra required software wise to make this work. It was an instant drop in adapter to let my SAS drives to their thing.

Using with Windows Server 2022 It doesnt seem to be on the lastest P16 firmware, but that is easily rectified by using IBM Megaraid to update from Windows using the files from FreeNAS/TrueNAS (Google it). This is an important thing to do as I had continual disconnections of SATA-based devices until I installed it. It runs a bit hot, but I screwed an 80mm fan into the heatsing and it runs nice and cool. A good value.

Card was working fine for first 3 months, then overheated (reached 99.0c during a restripe) and corrupted my raid6. Now i am getting constant i/o issues and my connected hard drives are continuously dropping under load. Works fine for light use, but gets very hot under larger read/write tasks.

This is a great card for the price, but don't expect to simply drop it into a standard desktop case and it work. It will require a little, research, tinkering and tweaking to make it work for your situation. Below I've addressed some items I saw in other reviews. Hopefully this helps future buyers make a good buy for their home lab. Despite other reviews complaining about this card not shipping with the latest firmware, I can confirm both of the cards I received had P16. One was 0.10.0 and the other was 0.12.0. From my 5 minute Google search there were no major changes made between the 10 and 12 revisions so don't worry about it. These cards do come with the boot services image installed in case you are wanting to boot from them. This is a reasonable safe assumption on the part of the seller because someone could want to boot from one of these rather than an NVMe or SSD in their home lab, but who am I to judge. The boot services do slow down the boot process if they are left on the card. In my case with 2 cards in one case that would have added close to a minute of extra boot time. Since I'm booting Proxmox from a sata SSD and these cards are being used for my 24bay SAS 12g case plus an external MD1200 SAS shelf the boot services weren't necessary. If you don't need boot services then grab the sas3flash.efi from broadcom, find a tutorial and delete that boot image. The other major concern about these cards was a heat issue. These cards were designed to be in a server grade case with what most would consider overkill and loud fans. If you are a home lab user with a standard desktop case designed for quiet, you will need to rig up some kind of fan system to ensure proper airflow across the heat sink. Some attached an 80mm fan straight on the heat sink, which is a viable option. Personally I would grab a PCI expansion slot fan and use that to avoid damage to the card itself with screws or zip ties. Just my opinion.

This is my first time using an HBA and I was very pleased to see how plug and play it was. I ordered some cables featured in the "frequently purchased together" section on Amazon and thankfully it all played nicely together. I have 7 SATA SSDs connected to this thing with no issues so far. I plan on adding more drives shortly. As noted in the headline - this thing gets HOT HOT HOT. I pulled an 80mm fan out of my PC graveyard and zip-tied it to the PCIe brackets at the back of my NAS case. I also put a 140mm on the size with the connectors blowing toward the card and it's slightly warmer than room temperature now. Without the fans I nearly burned my fingers removing the card during my initial testing. 10/10 would recommend this card.

I was a little worried as I have a bit of an obscure server. Plugged it in to my riser card instead of the Raid Expander. Changed out the cables and booted up. OS saw every drive perfectly. Because it is in a server chassis, it runs 50c which is perfectly content.

I bought and installed mine in a TrueNAS server in July 2024 and it failed just as the clock turned over to 2025. Although mine was inside a Factal Node 804 case (these have excellent air flow) I think that it was likely a casualty of the amount of heat it generated. These do run hot and from other reviews I knew that in advance. So beware. Other than that, it is an excellent board: runs fast, great True/FreeNAS compatibility, I love the cable connection system, and it was trivial to install.

The product itself is good. Fully operational and works as expected. The only complaint is that product is listed with P16 IT mode firmware installed. This was not the case when the product was received from seller SCSI4ME. P16 firmware for this particular card (16i) can be found on TrueNAS as Broadcom only lists the 8i P16 firmware. Be aware that the 16i contains 2 controllers and will need firmware on both to be updated.

Excelente producto, viene listo para usarse, solo hay que conectar los cables y listo, el software que trae pre-cargado funciona perfectamente en modo IT justo como lo menciona el vendedor. Como es bien sabido, esta tarjeta puede calentarse bastante entonces es una muy buena idea comprar un ventilador pequeño y un bracket para sujetarlo justo debajo de la tarjeta, así se mantiene a buena temperatura todo el tiempo. La he usado casi un año y ha funcionado sin ningún problema con 16 discos de entre 8TB y 24TB.

Card is not recognized by the motherbord.