Heya guys,
I know you guys will have good oppinions on this: I'm looking for the best kind of hardware RAID controller...
To my understanding, a *true* hardware controller will be OS & BIOS independant, and have it's own RAM and CPU. I'm looking for something with four SATA I / II / 2.5 / 3.0 ports and it should support NCQ and S.M.A.R.T.
I was looking at the 3ware ones, but even though they *say* they are hardware controllers, they list compatable OS's and they don't have a onboard fan or heatsink, so I don't think they have a CPU... they are probably "fake" hardware controllers.
Any advice is appreciated. Thanks


LinkBack URL
About LinkBacks
Reply With Quote
Those Areca ones look pretty neat. I wonder if they are "fake" hardware controllers or "true" hardware controllers. Directhex pointed out that there is a difference, but I'm not able to distinguish it.
| Zalman CNPS 9500LED + Arctic Cooling MX-1 | Asus A8N-SLi Deluxe + Zalman Northbridge | 1024MB DDR RAM (2 x 512MB Corsair XMS Pro TwinX) | Leadtek nVidia 6600GT 128MB | Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Xtreme Music | 2x80GB Hitachi Deskstar SATA-II (RAID 0) | Gigabyte 3D Aurora Case | Hiper Type-R 580W Modular | Enermax Ultimate Fan Controller| Microsoft Nautral 4000 | Logitech G5 + fUnc 1030| Ideazon Fang | SpeedLink Medusa 5.1 Surround Headset | Samsung SM913N 19" TFT | Compro DVB-T200
But most people want performance. RAID will look great, absolutely fabulous when you run your HDtach and other benchmark progs, you will see double data transfer rates and you'll be happy. Very happy. About 2 months later you'll realise that your machine doesn't feel much faster and gradually you'll think about the money you spent... I went from twin 36GB raptors to a single T7K250, yes it was slower, but it wasn't very noticable, and I certainly loved the extra capacity. I don't really notice the difference between that and my 150GB raptor either, and they are faster than a RAID 0 7k solution, apparently...