PCI(-X) Hard Drive Adapter Cards

[Serra]

We talk a lot about how to increase performance here, and in that spirit I'm wondering if we can get some feedback from people who have tried different hard drive adapter cards (SATA preferred, but we'll take some SCSI users too). Why? Well SATA comes in 2 main flavours, 1.5Gbps and 3Gbps... but the theoretical throughput of a hard drive adapter card is 4.23Gbps* on PCI and 8.46GBps* on PCI-X! Not only that, good hard drive adapter cards come with their own on-board processors and cache. As an added bonus usually these come as RAID cards, and you can't ignore the bonus of a good RAID setup.

Personally, I'm looking at getting an Intel RAID controller w/ SATA 2 support, a 64MB cache of PC100 ECC memory, and a 100MHz processor (comes in around $400CDN)... but I want to make sure it's worth it first. Plus, it just would be neat to see some benches using one.

[Ugly n Grey]

Storagereview.com usually has pretty up to date information. Any hardware RAID is going to outperform whatever ships with these consumer grade mobos. I tend to buy Adaptec SCSI because of their almost universal OS support. I use a lot of Solaris and 64 bit Linux, I tend to just do it because it's easy, but I've also never had performance or speed problems with them. Anyhow, I tend to pick for compatibility with what I use, performance is secondary because cards at the high end tend to be pretty close together.

Intel makes a decent card I understand, I just won't buy hardware from them anymore, they get in and out business in different lines too fast for me. I still recall getting stuck with a bunch of high end fax cards when they dropped their modem business. I like their network cards and their platforms (chipsets/CPUS), but I won't buy anything else from them.

Good luck :)!!!