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Originally Posted by iroc409
actually, i wouldn't really say it's that expensive anymore for the controllers. from what i hear, both highpoint and promise have good ide-raid solutions.
highpoint's entries include the rocket raid 454, which will do raid 5 for up to 8 drives, and runs about $95.
promise is a little more expensive, like the sx4000 at around $150 (4 drive) and the sx6000 (6 drive) at about $250. both units however have onboard memory (pc133), and seem to be a little bit better with raid 5 due to better onboard hardware.
apparently highpoint has fixed their raid 5 woes on their devices, and the hpt374 chip is natively supported by freebsd.
just my $.02
edit: i probably wouldn't be using a highpoint raid 5 setup in the same machine, i would use it in a dedicated fileserver - highpoint cards use more cpu power to do its duties, whereas i _believe_ the promise units are basically all on-board.
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The hpt 454 uses a hpt374 controller, which is commonly found on motherboards, and is a software solution.
The sx4000 is a much nicer card--but only if you intend to create a RAID5 array--it has an onboard XOR processor, but all other calculations for striping and mirroring are still done by the host CPU.
The sx6000 however, is a _real_ RAID card, as far as I'm concerned. It hosts an i960rm processor, which you should recognize if you've looked at other SCSI RAID cards in the past (the Adaptec 2110Ss I worked with a year ago used that controller). More common now is the Intel 80303--the pin-compatible successor to the i960, which is nearly identical...
Don't count out LSI Logic, either. They make some very nice chips/cards, and their prices are a bit lower than equivalent cards from other manufacturers. They also acquired Mylex a few years back, and some of those cards are still in circulation at VERY low prices (found under 'Lecacy RAID' on
www.lsilogic.com).
One other thing to be concerned with, though: many RAID cards are 64b PCI cards, or PCI-X. If you're not planning to run a workstation-level board, you're probably stuck with the lower-end IDE RAID stuff, or SCSI soft-ish RAID (like the adaptec HostRAID, which only does hardware mirroring, but supports host based striping...).