3ware 9690SA-4I-SGL PCI Express SATA / SAS Controller Card (Integrator 1-Pack) - Single

Pros: Super fast, reliable, good support, hardware raid.

Cons: It supports RAID6 ONLY if you have 5 drives or more which means it requires a SAS expander to get the full usage of the card. As that's the primary reason I bought the card I was disappointed.

Pros: Straight SATA drive: 80 MB/sec, 9650 Raid 10: 150 MB/sec, 9690SA Raid 10: 220 MB/sec!

Cons: Not currently supported by the default CentOS kernel like 9650 is and even the included drivers are not current enough. Make sure to download the latest drivers from 3ware.com to create your driver disk for use during installation. I would assume it won't be long before the drivers are included in the kernel by default.

Overall Review: All of my tests are in CentOS X64 with the Western Digital RE3 YS line of 7200rpm server drives. Here are the actual results... hdparm -tT /dev/sda Timing cached reads: 3812 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1905.37 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 664 MB in 3.00 seconds = 221.18 MB/sec

Pros: Speed and SSD compatability. With 4 32gig Patriot SSD drives I am seeing 700+MBs Reads and 400+MBs Writes which was an improvment over the onboard Nvidia raid which topped out just over 400MBs

Cons: Had to update the Firmware which can be a bit confusing as it generates several messages during the process.

Overall Review: Wished I had gotten a controler with more ports :-) After win 7 install go to update driver and it will pull a driver from microsoft that makes the card much more responcive.

Pros: - Does RAID very well, cached reads and writes - Easy to install - Good monitoring software - GUI & CLI interfaces - Driver built-in to Linux 2.6.23 or higher kernel's

Cons: - Can't do RAID-6 with 4 drives, so no RAID-6 if you're using SATA storage - SAS to SATA cable is separate

Overall Review: Installation was a breeze, I'm currently using 4 ST3320620NS 320G 7200 RPM drives. The 9690 card had no trouble seeing the drives and I had a RAID-5 array up and configured in no time. I'm currently using it on a small server running Ubuntu Server (Debian Linux), I installed the OS right on the RAID array with no troubles and I'm booting from it without issues. I am getting around 100MB/sec write peaks from the card to the disk (25MB/disk), I haven't tested to see what I'm getting over the network with cache but I'm guessing its a bit more than that. Overall the card is great and I would definitely recommend using it for a small NAS or home server. I did have to play around with the PCIe settings for my MB to recognize it as a 8x card, not hard but I would definitely check the BIOS after install to confirm it's running at full speed. I dropped a star for it due to the fact you can't use RAID-6 for less than 5 drives.

Pros: Good hardware based raid, increased speeds vs onboard & adaptec controlers (even single drives are faster with the 3Ware than with AMD790FX chipset). So far very stable.

Cons: Not compatable with port multipliers or JBOD devices. To do single-drive, it must be initialized and wiped out.

Overall Review: Even my onboard software RAID supports port multipliers! I would have bought the 8-port version (or maybe an Areca) if I knew that it had this limitation. Also, there is no fan on the chip & it seems to run a bit hot (~50C at the top of the main heatsink according to my temp probe)...so far no problems from this, but it does worry my enough to consider mounting a fan on it.

Pros: This is a great card, fast, hardware raid, but.....

Cons: It does not support Mac OS X 10.6.4 in 64 bit despite the Lsi sight saying it does with the new code set, its why I purchased the card, I called Lsi customer support and was informed that they are aware of the problem and there are no plans to have a working .kext. Works fine in 32 bit mode if thats what you are looking for. It also gets very hot so I wouldn't put it next to anything where temp is going to be a big problem.

Overall Review: wont settle for 32 bit so I'm Forced to duel boot with windows 7 on this card. Why does a 300$ card not support 64 bit mac. You would think they would have it together for the money they get.

Pros: Works in a Mac Pro as a secondary storage controller. Has a Mac driver, and works out of the box with Linux.

Cons: You cannot boot from the RAID on Mac hardware. The driver, and management software install for the Mac and Linux is terrible. Once everything is installed it works fine but really the products lacks the polish expected from a $300+ product.