Newegg.com - A great place to buy computers, computer parts, electronics, software, accessories, and DVDs online. With great prices, fast shipping, and top-rated customer service - Newegg shopping upgraded ™
If you are reading this message, Please click this link to reload this page.(Do not use your browser's "Refresh" button). Please email us if you're running the latest version of your browser and you still see this message.
Newegg.com - Computer Parts, Laptops, Electronics, HDTVs, Digital Cameras and More!
Sold and Shipped by Newegg
Pros: This HBA works flawlessly under OpenSolaris 2009.06. The builtin driver recognizes the card and the attached Promise VTJ610sS external storage enclosure.
Cons: Uses a non-standard SFF-8470 4x SAS connector (aka 4x Infiniband), rather than the standard SFF-8088 connector.
Pros: Stable drivers for both linux and windows. Graphical interface while inside either OS to monitor drive status and build/rebuild arrays. Incredibly fast.
Cons: Comes with no cables, so make sure you buy the SF-8484 cable to go with it. It gets a little warm during extended data operations, large file transfers and other things of the like. Long boot time for the card.
Overall Review: THIS IS NOT A TRUE RAID SOLUTION. However, it also is not Fakeraid or a softraid controller, its somewhat of a grey area between fakeraid and true raid. It uses software to span the volumes, however, all the processing is done by the card itself, so to the OS and your other components, this is essentially a true raid card. Currently I am running this with 4 1tb WD Caviar Green drives, even with the fact that they are storage class high energy efficiency drives, I am getting maximum sustained transfer rates of 380MB/S read, 180MB/S write.
Pros: Great stable drivers for linux/windows (didn't test others). Great read/write speeds (400MB/sec on a 16 bay SAS HBA).
Cons: not a single one.
Loading...

Pros: Have used this controller for three builds now. This one is for a little samba server for a client.
Two important things...
1) works perfectly with CentOS right out of the box. No monkey business getting it to work.
2) The LSI bios is simple and straight forward. I've had to replace several drives and it's no big deal. it just works, and I can see no noticable performance hit as the devices rebuild.
Note about software raid: I have tried using software raid on various linux'es. It's more trouble than it's worth and often just does not work. Do yourself a favor and spend a couple hundred bucks. you'll make it back in time and frustration.
Cons: Cable not included.