Best Hardware Raid Controller in your experience
 

Hello Community,

I'm in the market (possibly) for a Raid Host Controller and would like to hear ( read ) your take on the issue.

What I'm looking for:

True Hardware Raid, usually around $300 & up

Support for booting OS from Raid card

Native linux support ofcoarse

Reliability

I've been browsing newegg.com for several different vendors (Areca, Adaptec, & LSI ) they all seem to be pretty reputable from some reviews & their underlying specs but I did see a good amount of negative reviews as well all in the area of these units failing early after a few years or even months of service. I also realize these few reviews don't account for total sales but it looks too frequent in my opinion. Thats also going to depend on usage, a lot of people seem to use them in high i/o intensive 24/7 operation so thats also gonna bring down the life expectancy.

Few example cards I've been watching:
LSI MegaRaid 9260-4i

3ware 9750-4i

Areca ARC-1213-4I

I truly have no specific requirement for a raid card other than wanting to play around with various raid configurations and possibly boost overall performance of disk access.

What is your take on these hardware devices? Do their bang equal up to the buck you have to pay? Should I even waste my time or stick with the onboard Raid controller?

I can't say what is best. I have used an lsi for quite a long time and seems to be supported, at work there is quite a number of them in different situations. Many of the enterprise level cards are fully supported in linux since many servers are using bsd/linux.

I'd think that an onboard would be OK if it is a server type. Generally they internally connect to pci-x bus or pci-e bus anyway.

Some of the lower end onboard are just fake raids and not worth the time to play with.

I would highly reccomend 3ware 9750-4i

Great card, rock solid stable and best of all you cant beat the tw_cli utility. MegaCLI (LSI cards) is horrible, and I've had a lot of weird issues with Adaptec cards (24xx, 54xx) hanging under high i/o stress.

Thank you jefro & Chris E for your feedback,

I'm just trying to make an educated choice based on personal research & outside opinions. This is going to be a big purchase for me so I want to get it right. The $$ I put out for this card could be used to get a new i7 or such. Also for maybe $100 more I probaby could get the 8i cards to support more drives. Kinda trying to justify the need for such a card being it is't a neccessity more of a desire.

Again I thank you guys for the info.