What do you guys think of this card/company?

well it's got good reviews.
Care to elaborate on why your onboard fails to meet your expectations?
 
I have the 8 drive version of this card and have had it about a year. It works flawlessly in XP and now flawlessly in Vista 32. There was a time that I had problems with it before they had proper drivers for Vista but that is over now. I highly recommend this card even though it is a little pricy. There have been several times while reading or writing to the drive that I have encountered a BSD situation (software problems not related to the card) and the drive has never skipped a beat. I have had 3 generations of 3Ware cards and each time I upgraded it was a flawless upgrade. All I had to do was plug in the drives to the new card and it recognized the transferred drive immediately with no loss of time or data. The only drawback that I have encountered is that it does take longer to format or expand a Raid than most of the other brands out there but its reliability is worth every penny I spent.
 
I'd recommend the Areca 1210 instead. I have some doubts about 3ware's stability, and none about the Areca's. They have Vista drivers (32- and 64-bit) available here. I haven't tried them personally, but if they live up to the standard set by their drivers for other operating systems, they're doing pretty darn well. Either card is full hardware raid. The Areca is slightly cheaper.
 
There is one specific port on the board that errors out CONSTANTLY and its getting worse. It used to last about 6 months and now it seems like it never finishes rebuilding. Asus took out the 4th port for the Intel Matrix and spans it to the other chipset. The third port throws the error (I changed SATA cables and drives, still the same result). The good news is I seem to be able to get back in it, the card should arrive on Friday, I need to now figure away to back it up and send it to the new array.
 
Seems a little expensive for your application. Are you planning on expanding at a later point in time?
 
Expanding? I just want reliability. This is my only 'Vista' headache so far, though I suspect its an ASUS headache. God Asus' website is just a jumbled pile of shiznit :mad:
 
You should also consider the LSI Logic and Adaptec 4-port cards in this price range. The SATA II / SAS controllers also support port multipliers / expanders which will allow upto 20 drives on a 4 port controller with the use of active port multipliers.

I have had good luck with 3Ware myself but there was a time not so long ago when they were struggling and put out a batch of bad cards and had to issue recalls and post firmware fixes etc., after a lot of people lost a lot of data. They seem to be past that.

Probably the number one player now is LSI Logic with their cards being OEM'd by Dell, HP, IBM, etc. Stable and fast. Areca is a favorite in the aftermarket and build-your-own community.
 
Well, the card is on its way already, I'll let you know how it goes. Upon further research it appears this IS a Vista problem, but one that needs to be addressed ASAP.

Here's Intel's take:

http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/CS-025783.htm

Raid is rebuilding the failed drive (3rd time, none have completed successfully thusfar since latest bork) and we'll see if this error reoccurs.
 
i think 3Ware is a decent brand.

Areca, Adaptec and LSI Logic are good too!!!
 
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