Which Controller for 4 Drive RAID 5?

[Daynja]

I wish someone had done a comparison of the Areca 1210 vs the 1220. I will definitely only be using 4 drives (SATA II), but the 1220 has a faster processor. I'm just not sure if it will make a difference with only 4 drives. The 1210 seemed to perform poorly compared to the 3ware 9650SE-4LPML in a test on toms hardware.

Someone here also mentioned the areca 1212, but that is apparently meant for SAS. It would work, but supposedly not very well with SATA II drives?

The 1220 looks good, but I would be paying an extra $150 for performance only, as I won't use more than 4 drives. Is there any extra performance between the two (IOP332 vs IOP333)? Is it worth $150?

 

[DriveEuro]

Well, first and foremost... are you looking for high speed (hardware raid) or just for basic storage with the redundancy.

Personally, I use a highpoint 2320 (used to have a 2310). They're fine for reads, but their writes are kinda slow (for being RAID5). If you're just doing a lot of reads, then you don't need to spend a lot of money on a controller.

 

[Daynja]

Well I did some research on the IOP332 and IOP333, and the only differences seem to be the internal frequency and RAID6 support. I have no intention of using RAID6, especially since I will only be using 4 drives, so assuming areca is using the same clock speed with the 1210 and 1220, there shouldn't be much difference between the two. I haven't seen anything that lists the clock speed of these two controllers, so I guess I can only assume they are the same.

As far as needs, I'm pretty happy as long as everything is over 100MB/sec. I just want the best bang for my buck. I don't want to spend an extra $150 for no reason, and it looks like the ARC-1220 would be just that since I will never use more than 4 drives. Nothing against the 1220, I'm sure it would be awesome if you wanted 5-8 drives.

					Intel® IOP333 I/O Processor Chipset	Intel® IOP332 I/O Processor Chipset
Core Speed				500/667/800 MHz				500/667/800 MHz
Package Size				37.5 mm x 37.5 mm			37.5 mm x 37.5 mm
Integrated Bridge			PCI Express* to PCI-X* Bridge		PCI Express* to PCI-X* Bridge
Memory Controller			Dual-ported DDR 333 MHz/DDR2-400 MHz	Enhanced DDR 333 MHz/DDR2-400 MHz
Internal Frequency			333 MHz (up to 2.7 GB/s) Bus		266 MHz (up to 2.1 GB/s) Bus
Memory Addressable			DDR 333 (2 GB)/DDR2-400 (1 GB)		DDR 333 (2 GB)/DDR2-400 (1 GB)
Local Bus Width				D/16 Bits (66 MHz)			8/16 Bits (66 MHz)
DMA Buffer Size				1024 Bytes				1024 Bytes
ATU Buffer Size				4096 Bytes				4096 Bytes
Application Accelerator with XOR	Yes					Yes
RAID6					Yes					No
I2C Bus					2 Serial Units				2 Serial Units
Hardware-based CRC32C check		Yes					Yes
UART					(2) 4-Pin (16550)			(2) 4-Pin (16550)
Arbiter					Yes					Yes
External Interrupts			16 + 1 HPI				16 + 1 HPI