I'm not sure I've ever heard of an M1015 failing on the forums.
There've been a few instances of what might be bad cards or PCIe problems and it hasn't been clear, but I will note that knockoff cards are an occupational hazard in the used market. The
Cisco router guys have to be real wary of fakes too. But sometimes you'll acquire parts from a
supposedly reputable reseller like NewEgg and they can be knockoffs too. We got some great dual-port Intel Pro/1000 MT knockoffs from NewEgg mid-2000's, which struck me as particularly odd since dual cards are a bit esoteric. But higher margin I guess.
So anyways,
Fewer servers coming off-lease meaning that they usually end their lease at the end of a Corporate fiscal year in September? Or that the economy has sent sales plummeting and lengthened lease periods?
No, sorry, was way too terse. I kind of forget most of you guys aren't in the business sometimes

See, what tends to happen are two things, one when a server is purchased and one at the end of a lease.
When a server is purchased, manufacturers often push certain options and buyers may take the deal, then go and buy the controller of their choice, pull the M1015, and eBay the leftover "new-pull" card for some extra beer money. So you would probably have seen a glut of low priced cards at that time.
At the end of the lease what happens is that the servers are returned and maybe refurbished or parts'ed up for resale on eBay. So basically you have to rewind three years and look at what IBM's popular offerings were at the time. The ServeRAID was introduced as a low-end controller back in 2009. I don't know what kind of promos they were running but prices seemed really good in 2012-2013 on eBay so I'm guessing they flooded the market in 2009-2010. That's when you see a flood of "used/tested/great condition!" cards hit eBay.