I selected this hba card so that I don't have to buy the cable needed to connect to the supermicro backpane. I have an extra SATA to Micro SAS(SFF8643) cable that came with my workstation. The Supermicro motherboard only had 4 SATA 6gbs controllers and needed 4 more so I can use all of the 8 hard drives. I flashed the card to IT mode and works like a charm.