SATA 6Gbps hardware RAID

[eddieck]

I'm looking for a hardware RAID controller with SATA 6Gbps support for my friend's rig. His specifications are the same as mine (P6T SE board). He plans on using 4 of those Crucial 6Gbps SSDs. I've found one LSI controller but the reviews indicate it's not compatible with certain Asus boards like the P6T6 (which should be similar enough to what him and I have, the P6T SE).

Actual hardware RAID is a must and price isn't very important, as long as it's "reasonable" (i.e. a few hundred is fine, but not a few thousand!).

 

[sub.mesa]

Look very carefully at the IOps capabilities of the hardware RAID controller; most would approach the chips limits for a single fast SSD like Intel for small random reads. May not be a big issue, but i think your controller should do at least 100.000 IOps or you might be capped on random I/O.

Generally, software RAID scales better for SSDs due to lower latency and faster hardware available. I assume you will be running RAID0 either mixed with RAID1? RAID5 might not be such a good idea due to small writes being amplified on the SSDs.