When i first started using and testing SAS equipment several years ago the SAS standard wasn't really popular amongst non-professionals and so almost all of the available solutions back then were considered enterprise grade because of their somewhat high cost, wealth of features and performance levels. Fast forward a few years in the future and right now there are even consumer oriented mainboards that feature entry-level onboard SAS controllers in an effort to cover consumers who are not after the extra features and performance offered by mid and high-end add-on cards. Now as some of you know last year we paired the latest LSI MegaRAID 9265-8i 6Gb/s 8 port SATA+SAS RAID Controller and its main counterpart manufactured by ARECA the ARC-1882i 8 Port 6Gb/s SAS/SATA RAID Adapter with a total of 8 Kingston HyperX 120GB SATA III SSDs to see just which solutions offered the best bang for your buck and in the end both produced impressive results. Well today we are placing both cards against one of the latest mid-end SAS/SATA RAID controllers to hit the market by LSI, the MegaRAID 9271-8i 6Gb/s 8 port SATA+SAS RAID Controller to see if LSI has brought anything new to the table.