The Broadcom HBA 9400-16i is a Broadcom 12Gb/s SAS-3, tri-mode (SAS / SATA / NVMe) controller with 16 internal ports and 4 x SFF-8643 (Mini-SAS HD) connectors. It presents drives directly with the firmware it ships with, so it needs no flashing for ZFS or TrueNAS.
Prices updated
| Manufacturer | Broadcom |
| Ports | 16 internal |
| Internal / external | Internal |
| SAS generation | 12Gb/s SAS-3, tri-mode (SAS / SATA / NVMe) |
| PCIe | not verified |
| Connectors | 4 x SFF-8643 (Mini-SAS HD) |
3 in-stock listings · ranked by price · refreshed every few hours
The newest card in this list and the only tri-mode one, meaning it addresses NVMe devices as well as SAS and SATA. It costs meaningfully more than the 9300 and 9305 cards, and for a build that is entirely spinning disks that premium buys nothing you will use.
In specification terms it carries 16 internal ports, it is a 12Gb/s SAS-3, tri-mode (SAS / SATA / NVMe) part, and its drive-side connectors are 4 x SFF-8643 (Mini-SAS HD). We do not state a PCIe generation for this card because we have not confirmed one against vendor documentation. Those are catalogue facts and we publish them as such — you will not find throughput or performance claims on this page, because the number that matters for a spinning-disk array is what the drives can do, not what the card can.
Broadcom publishes the 9400 series as HBAs. The distinguishing feature over the 9300 and 9305 lines is tri-mode support, meaning the card addresses SAS, SATA and NVMe devices rather than SAS and SATA only.
This card terminates in 4 x SFF-8643 (Mini-SAS HD), and the cable question catches people out more often than the card question does. The connector on the card and the connector on your chassis backplane have to be matched by a cable with the right ends — SFF-8643 is the Mini-SAS HD connector used by 12Gb/s-era hardware, and SFF-8087 is the older Mini-SAS used by 6Gb/s-era hardware. They are not interchangeable, and forward and reverse breakout cables are different parts again.
Work out what your backplane presents before ordering, because a card that arrives with the wrong cable is a working card you cannot connect. Some used-card listings include cables and some do not; the listing text is the only reliable guide, and where it is silent, assume not.
Builds that mix spinning disks with U.2 NVMe, or that expect to. For an all-HDD array the older 16-port cards do the same job for less.
For the drive side, a card of this class drives SAS hard drives and — because SAS controllers speak to SATA devices by design — SATA drives as well, which is the combination that makes a used enterprise chassis worth filling. This particular card also addresses U.2 NVMe drives, which the SAS-only cards on this list do not. Which specific chassis you are filling, and how many bays it has, is covered in the used server buyer's guides.
The naming on these cards is systematic once you know the scheme, and knowing it saves you from a surprising number of bad purchases. In the LSI and Broadcom lines the digits identify the family and generation, and the suffix identifies the port arrangement: the number is how many ports, and the letter is where they face. An i means internal ports, facing the drives inside the chassis. An e means external, facing a port on the back of the machine for an external enclosure. Cards exist with both.
So the 9400-16i designation on this card tells you it presents 16 internal ports, and that they are internal. This matters because an external card in a build that needs internal ports is useless, and the two are separated by a single letter in a listing title that is easy to skim past. If you are filling bays inside the chassis, you want the internal variant, and you should check the letter rather than assuming.
The straightforward answer is 16 internal — one drive per port, directly attached. The answer that matters in a real chassis is usually larger, because of a part most people do not realise is already in their machine: the SAS expander.
An expander is a switch for SAS. It takes a small number of ports from the controller and fans them out to many more drives, and a great many enterprise backplanes have one built into the board. This is why a 24-bay server can run perfectly well from a single eight-port card: the card talks to the expander, and the expander talks to all twenty-four drives. Whether your chassis has one is a property of the backplane rather than the card, and it is worth establishing before deciding how many ports to buy — people routinely purchase a sixteen-port card for a chassis whose backplane would have been happy with eight.
The one thing to know about expanders is that SATA drives behind a SAS expander is a supported arrangement, and it is how most mixed builds work. If your backplane has no expander, then the arithmetic is simple and unforgiving: you need as many ports as drives, and a breakout cable turns one connector into four drive connections.
Two practical things catch people out when the card arrives, and neither is on the specification sheet.
The first is airflow. These cards were designed for rack chassis with substantial front-to-back airflow, and their heatsinks are passive — there is no fan on the card because the server was assumed to provide the moving air. Putting one in a quiet desktop case with gentle airflow is a well-documented source of trouble in homelab discussions, and the usual remedy people describe is directing a small fan across the heatsink. We are relaying that as community practice rather than a specification, and we publish no temperature figures because we have not measured any. In an actual server chassis, which is what this cluster is about, it is a non-issue.
The second is the bracket. Cards ship with either a full-height or a low-profile bracket fitted, and a 1U chassis needs low-profile. Sometimes the other bracket is in the box and sometimes it is not. It is a trivial part that will stall a build for a week if it is missing, so read the listing and, if it is silent, assume you are getting whichever is in the photograph.
This is a heavily second-hand market and the condition column in the table above reflects that. Cards pulled from decommissioned servers are the normal supply, they are typically cheap, and there is no moving part to wear out — which makes a used HBA a substantially safer used purchase than a used drive. The risks are different in kind: not wear, but authenticity and firmware state, which is why the counterfeit checks on the HBA hub are worth reading before you buy rather than after.
Broadcom publishes the 9400 series as HBAs. The distinguishing feature over the 9300 and 9305 lines is tri-mode support, meaning the card addresses SAS, SATA and NVMe devices rather than SAS and SATA only.
It terminates in 4 x SFF-8643 (Mini-SAS HD). SFF-8643 is the Mini-SAS HD connector used by 12Gb/s-era hardware and SFF-8087 is the older Mini-SAS used by 6Gb/s-era hardware; they are not interchangeable, and forward and reverse breakout cables are different parts again. Establish what your backplane presents before ordering — a card with the wrong cable is a working card you cannot connect. Some listings include cables, many do not, and where the listing is silent, assume not.
It has 16 internal ports, and in the straightforward case that means 16 directly attached drives. More is possible through a SAS expander, which is a separate part that fans one card's ports out to more drives — many enterprise backplanes have one built in, which is why a 24-bay chassis can run from an 8-port card. Check whether your backplane is expander-equipped before deciding how many ports you need.
Generally yes, and this is largely a second-hand market. Cards pulled from decommissioned servers are the normal supply and there is no moving part to wear out, which makes a used HBA a safer used purchase than a used drive. The real risks are authenticity and firmware state rather than wear, so run the counterfeit checks on our HBA hub before the return window closes.
In broad terms yes — it is a standard PCIe card and PCIe is close to universal, so a card of this class 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-specific card shape rather than a standard PCIe card. Check which slot your machine offers before buying.
Relabelled and counterfeit cards are a recurring subject on ServeTheHome, r/homelab and the TrueNAS forums — we are attributing that as community reporting rather than putting a number on it, because no credible measurement exists. The practical checks: ask for a photograph of the board rather than the label, since the label is the cheapest part to fake; look for consistent silkscreen and a heatsink matching the reference design; and once the card is in your hands, use Broadcom's own storage command-line tooling to read the controller, firmware and SAS address back from the hardware. Do that before the return window closes.
LSI / Broadcom SAS 9300-8i · LSI / Broadcom SAS 9300-16i · LSI / Broadcom SAS 9305-16i · LSI SAS 9207-8i · LSI SAS 9211-8i · Dell PERC HBA330
Start at the HBA hub for the full decoder table, or the IT mode guide if you are choosing a card for ZFS or TrueNAS.