pretty good results for the Perc5i you guys have with your HDDs. Your results are pretty nice pjkenned, must be awesome to have that much storage capacity! Jcool, your crystalmark is higher, but only on the 100mb test. but like you said too, the cache influences the results too much on small sizes, so I only did 1000mb.

As far as further potential, honestly I think I'm all capped out in terms of the Perc 5i. I don't know great detail about this stuff, but I found in a post that the Perc 5i is really a PCI-X card with a bridge that allows it to be put into PCI-E 8x slots. Here is the post http://www.overclock.net/6316677-post2514.html. To summarize, the Perc 5i should have 500MB/s theoretical maximum on Sequential writes, but its possible to have higher reads. That explains how pjkenned hit as much as 700MB/s reads on his setup.

But yeah , like One Hertz said, certain controllers handle SSDs much bettter than HDDs. This card is like... 4-5 years old and was never intended to handle SSDs I don't think. But for < $100, its not a bad card by any means, especially if you are going to have a Raid 5 parity check array with storage. I have no faith in AMD onboard RAID, which is why I got this for SSD use. If I had an Intel board, Vertex in RAID under ICH10 seems like the way to go without adding any additional costs.