A RAID card presents virtual disks; a host bus adapter presents the drives themselves. ZFS, TrueNAS and Unraid need the second. Broadcom's 9207, 9300, 9305 and 9400 cards, Dell's HBA330 and HPE's H240 are HBAs by design and need no flashing. The LSI 9211-8i and Dell H310 ship in RAID mode and are flashed by the community; a listing that says “preflashed” is making a claim, not stating a specification.
Prices updated
Ports, SAS generation, PCIe and connectors are catalogue specifications. The IT-mode column is the one to read carefully, and it carries its own provenance label: a vendor fact means the manufacturer documents the part as a host bus adapter, and a community / seller claim means the useful mode is a firmware change that the community documents and that a seller may or may not have actually performed.
| Card | Ports | SAS | PCIe | Connectors | IT mode | From | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LSI / Broadcom SAS 9300-8i | 8 internal | 12Gb/s SAS-3 | PCIe 3.0 x8 | 2 x SFF-8643 | IT NATIVEVENDOR FACT | $43 | Buy |
| LSI / Broadcom SAS 9300-16i | 16 internal | 12Gb/s SAS-3 | PCIe 3.0 x8 | 4 x SFF-8643 | IT NATIVEVENDOR FACT | $68 | Buy |
| LSI / Broadcom SAS 9305-16i | 16 internal | 12Gb/s SAS-3 | PCIe 3.0 x8 | 4 x SFF-8643 | IT NATIVEVENDOR FACT | $84 | Buy |
| Broadcom HBA 9400-16i | 16 internal | 12Gb/s SAS-3 | not verified | 4 x SFF-8643 | IT NATIVEVENDOR FACT | $140 | Buy |
| LSI SAS 9207-8i | 8 internal | 6Gb/s SAS-2 (SAS2308) | PCIe 3.0 x8 | 2 x SFF-8087 | IT NATIVEVENDOR FACT | $50 | Buy |
| LSI SAS 9211-8i | 8 internal | 6Gb/s SAS-2 (SAS2008) | PCIe 2.0 x8 | 2 x SFF-8087 | FLASHABLECOMMUNITY / SELLER CLAIM | $40 | Buy |
| Dell PERC HBA330 | 8 internal | 12Gb/s SAS-3 | PCIe 3.0 x8 (adapter variant) | 2 x SFF-8643 on the adapter variant | IT NATIVEVENDOR FACT | $20 | Buy |
| Dell PERC H310 | 8 internal | 6Gb/s SAS-2 | PCIe 2.0 x8 (adapter variant) | 2 x SFF-8087 | FLASHABLECOMMUNITY / SELLER CLAIM | $33 | Buy |
| Dell PERC H710 / H710P | 8 internal | 6Gb/s SAS-2 | PCIe 2.0 x8 (adapter variant) | 2 x SFF-8087 | RAID ONLYVENDOR FACT | $38 | Buy |
| Dell PERC H730 / H730P | 8 internal | 12Gb/s SAS-3 | PCIe 3.0 x8 (adapter variant) | 2 x SFF-8643 | RAID ONLYVENDOR FACT | $49 | Buy |
| HPE Smart HBA H240 | 8 internal | 12Gb/s SAS-3 | PCIe 3.0 x8 | 2 x SFF-8643 | IT NATIVEVENDOR FACT | $50 | Buy |
36 in-stock listings across 11 cards · prices are the cheapest live listing for each card · no throughput or performance figures are published on these pages
A used server nearly always arrives with a storage controller already in it, and which one decides whether the machine suits the thing most people are buying it for. The distinction is not about speed or features. It is about what the operating system is allowed to see.
A RAID controller sits between the disks and the operating system and presents virtual disks. You configure an array in the card's own firmware, and the operating system sees the result — one device where there were eight. The card owns the redundancy, the rebuild and the disk health information. That is a coherent and long-established design, and for a Windows file server or a hypervisor datastore it works well.
A host bus adapter does not do that. It connects the disks to the machine and gets out of the way, so the operating system sees each physical drive individually, along with its SMART data. That is the arrangement ZFS is built for, and the reason it matters is worth being precise about: ZFS manages redundancy itself, and it needs to know which physical device returned bad data in order to repair it from parity. A RAID card that has already merged eight disks into one virtual device has thrown away the information ZFS needs to do its job.
The failure mode is what makes this worth caring about. It is not that the system refuses to boot or that the array will not build — it is that everything appears to work while the filesystem is blind to the health of the hardware underneath it. You find out at the worst possible moment. This is why the ZFS and TrueNAS communities are unusually insistent on this point, and why IT mode is a phrase homelab buyers learn early.
The practical upshot for somebody shopping: decide this before you buy the machine, not after. Which controller is fitted is a question you can ask a seller in one line, and it is far cheaper to select for than to change. Our IT mode guide goes deeper on the ZFS side, including what TrueNAS's own documentation says.
Fake, relabelled and misrepresented LSI and Broadcom cards are a well-known problem in this market, and it is worth saying plainly before you shop. This is not a rumour: it is a recurring subject on ServeTheHome, r/homelab, the TrueNAS forums and the Level1Techs forums, where buyers regularly post cards that arrived with the wrong silicon under a convincing sticker. We are attributing that as community reporting because that is what it is. We have not run a study, and we are not going to put a percentage on it, because nobody credible has measured one.
What we can do is describe the diligence that those same communities have converged on. None of it requires special equipment:
The listings on these pages are filtered at seed time to those naming a recognised manufacturer — Broadcom, LSI, Avago, Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Supermicro, ATTO, Areca, Microchip or Adaptec. Generic no-name “SAS controller card” listings are rejected before they reach the catalogue, because that is where the problem concentrates. That filter is a reduction in risk, not a guarantee of authenticity, and we would rather say so than imply a vetting process we do not operate.
The good news is that this is mostly not a compatibility question. These are standard PCIe cards, PCIe is close to universal, and a card of this class will work in most machines with a free slot of adequate width. Where people go wrong is not the bus — it is the bracket and the slot type.
The significant exception is Dell's dedicated storage slot. Dell's PERC and HBA330 parts come in both a standard PCIe adapter form and a mini-monolithic form that fits Dell's own integrated storage slot on many PowerEdge machines. They are not interchangeable: a mini-mono card will not go into a general PCIe slot, and a standard card will not go into the mini-mono slot. Listings frequently do not make the distinction obvious, so read the form factor before buying — this is the single most common wasted purchase in this category.
The other thing to check is the bracket. A 1U chassis needs a low-profile bracket, and cards are sold with either full-height or low-profile fitted, sometimes with the other in the box and sometimes not. It is a two-dollar part that will stop your build for a week if it is missing.
Beyond that, match the card to the chassis by bay count: an 8-port card drives an eight to twelve-bay machine directly, and a 16-port card or an expander-equipped backplane covers a 24-bay. Which configuration your machine actually is, is covered in the used server buyer's guides, and the carriers those bays need are in the parts index.
A RAID controller sits between the disks and the operating system and presents virtual disks — you configure an array in the card's firmware and the OS sees one device where there were eight. An HBA connects the drives and gets out of the way, so the OS sees every physical disk and its SMART data. That second arrangement is what ZFS, TrueNAS and Unraid are built for, because they manage redundancy themselves and need to know which physical device returned bad data in order to repair it.
If you want the simple answer: a card from Broadcom's HBA lines, which are non-RAID by design and need no firmware work — the 9300-8i for an eight-to-twelve bay chassis, or a 16-port card for a larger one. If your machine is a PowerEdge, Dell's own HBA330 is documented by Dell as a non-RAID HBA and is the cleanest option because it stays on the vendor's parts list. On ProLiant hardware, HPE's Smart HBA H240 plays the same role.
Only for cards that ship in RAID or IR mode — the LSI 9211-8i and the Dell H310 being the two famous examples. Broadcom's 9207, 9300, 9305 and 9400 HBAs, Dell's HBA330 and HPE's H240 are host bus adapters by design and need no flashing at all. If you would rather not touch firmware, buy one of those. We do not publish flashing procedures; they are unofficial, version-sensitive and can leave a card unusable, so we link the community write-ups instead.
Relabelled and counterfeit cards are a recurring subject on ServeTheHome, r/homelab, the TrueNAS forums and Level1Techs, where buyers regularly post cards that arrived with the wrong silicon under a convincing sticker. We are attributing that as community reporting rather than putting a figure on it, because no credible measurement exists. The practical response is to ask for a photograph of the board rather than the label, and to verify the card with Broadcom's own storage command-line tooling on arrival, before the return window closes.
Broadly yes — these are standard PCIe cards and PCIe is close to universal, so a card works in most machines with a free slot of adequate width. The notable exception is Dell's mini-monolithic and integrated storage slots, which take a Dell-shaped card rather than a standard PCIe one; a mini-mono HBA330 will not go into a generic PCIe slot and a standard card will not go into the mini-mono slot. Check which your machine offers, and note that low-profile brackets matter in 1U chassis.
Directly, as many as it has ports — eight for an 8i card, sixteen for a 16i. Beyond that you need a SAS expander, which fans one card's ports out to more drives. Many enterprise backplanes have an expander built in, which is why a 24-bay chassis often runs happily from a single 8-port card. Establish whether your backplane is expander-equipped before deciding how many ports to buy.
Yes, and nearly all supply is second-hand — cards pulled from decommissioned fleets. There is no moving part to wear out, which makes a used HBA a considerably safer used purchase than a used drive. The risks here are authenticity and firmware state rather than wear, which is why the counterfeit checks on this page are worth working through before the return window closes rather than after.