Looking to buy a new hba since the first one had enough daisy-chained expanders and the bandwidth just isn’t enough.
Checking on ebay, I see that there are lots of Chinese sellers offering 9211-8i or equivalents for less than half the price I paid for the first one at theartofserver.
One seller has a 40k+ ratings with a 99%+ positive feedback, which got me thinking if the cards they are selling are genuine refurbished cards or counterfeit? I’d be glad to get some feedback if you got a card from one of these sellers.
Should I take my chance or not take any risks trying to save 25-30 bucks? I’d choose the latter, but if you got any experience about the aforementioned cards, I’d love to hear it.
Extra question: I see that there are two versions(?) of cards selling under the 9211-8i name. One’s ports are on the right side of the heatsink, far from the bracket (I have this one), and the other one has ports near the bracket, marked port 1 and port0 from left to right. Are these both genuine or is the latter one counterfeit?
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You can buy a SAS3 adapter for under $20 shipped from a US based seller
https://www.ebay.com/itm/195918369621
It’s been my HBA of choice for many months now.
It’s from Inspur, which is another Chinese brand but I didn’t hear much bad reviews about them.
China has lots of data centers that surplus out old equipment too - I’m sure they have their fair share of legit old pulls to sell off.
China also processes a lot of e-waste from around the world - I’m sure globally there were many millions of those cards sold. I’m sure they just pull and resell anything that’s in demand.
That said, they also produce fake chips (or pulled / relabeled chips) and sell them for $5 in single quantities on ebay too - buying anything from China is a crapshoot. Even from the same seller/store but ordered placed at different times, one time you might get legit stuff, the next time you might get garbage.
The good thing about ebay is you can always get a refund if it’s “not as described” - especially so if it’s counterfeit.
I see, thank you for your answer. I guess if I get a fake one I can just refund it, but it’ll just lose me ~2 weeks.
I went with theartofserver because I’d rather deal with him than Chinese sellers. He’s great at providing help if you have issues and that’s worth more to me than cheaper.
I bought my current card from them! Didn’t need any extra help from them but his Youtube channel is really informative.
He was great was great when I bought a second 8i HBA and it wouldn’t work in a x4 slot. Went through a few things with him and isolated that it was the slot that was faulty. So got a port multiplier instead, which only needs power from the slot and achieved the same results.
Same here. He also has a Youtube channel with lots of great info
People say you can get the parts cheaper elsewhere…
But that’s literally the only downside I’ve ever read about him (and I’m at 2 successful purchases myself).
which got me thinking if the cards they are selling are genuine refurbished cards or counterfeit?
It depends on the seller.
They could also be legitimately produced cards that didn’t meet QA standards and were supposed to be recycled but someone stole them to resell.
They could also be “ghost shift” cards, which is a whole category of counterfeits:
a) Extra capacity produced by a vendor off the books. (E.g. Company A orders Company B to make 10,000 widgets. Company B makes Company A their 10,000 widgets, but secretly makes an extra 5,000 widgets to sell themselves).
These are “legitimate” cards insofar as they were made by the same sub-vendor using the same machines, materials, and processes, but they are not officially licensed. They may even be QA tested.
b) Produced outside of normal business hours. (E.g. “Bob” snuck into the factory at midnight and turned on the widget machine for an hour and took them home to sell).
Again, these are “legitimate” cards insofar as they were made by the same vendor using the same machines, materials, and processes, but they are not officially licensed, and almost certainly did not go through QA testing.
(The main difference between this and the above is usually scale/scope. In the first case it’s a company intentionally overproducing vs this is one or more people doing it unknown to the company).
c) Produced with inferior quality materials. This could be a case of a) or b) but while also using lower/cheaper quality materials to make even more money. These may still work, but are very likely out of spec and more prone to failure than the above.
Everybody should have at least one sneaky Bob in their life.
I’d buy a 9207-based card rather than a 9211 at this point, something like this listing or this one. No sense in getting something that uses PCIe2 when you could get something that uses PCIe3 for the same price.
I haven’t bought one of these, but my experience buying stuff from China is that it’s likely to be perfectly fine, and I’d buy one if I needed a SAS card.
Only a small sample, but I’ve purchased about a dozen that I’ve used personally, and for builds for other people that have been churning for years so far so good. Just make sure it gets adequate cooling.
As far as location of the SAS connectors, 9211-8i should be facing parallel out the front of the card. I believe the 9207-8i and 9210-8i with similar specs are perpendicular out the middle of the card.
Most if not all of them are fake cards with real recycled components. They take broken server boards with soldered HBA chips and put them onto a new fake PCB, then sell it back to you. Same thing is true with network cards