I was wondering about hardware raid. I know from research that Raid on Chip (RoC) usually refers to a hardware raid solutions for pci-e cards. I have looked at adaptec, lsi and areca. LSI and Areca in some cases use power pc and arm processors. For example, a card I am looking closely at is the LSI 9341-4i 12gb card to potentially purchase. I know it doesn't have cache ram but uses a power pc processor and is not called a Raid on Chip solution. The question that is burning me is this: aren't ARM and power pc processors also hardware solution since they use hardware processors for the raid processing? Or are power pc and arm processors a hybrid hardware solution?
I wanted to raid 4 ocz vector 150 ssd's in raid 0. I know the 12gbit is a little overkill,but I want to utilize my full potential of my motherboard (g1.sniper 5)and get a pci-e 3.0 8x card. This card sells for $265 cdn (kit with SAS fanout cable) while everything else 6 or 12gbit in pci-e 3.0 sells for $540 or above that I have looked at. put it this way, a adaptec pci-e 2.0 4x 6805e card sells for about the same price as the 9341-4i with 8 6gbit ports. However, since trying the 6805e, I can't get the Adaptec raid software (new and old) to work properly with windows 8.1. And the 6805e generates a lot of heat.
One thing I would like to let you know about: Those 4 SAS ports don't support 4 drives; they support 4 SAS port multipliers for a total drive support of 64. In your case, you are going to want to run 2 drives per SAS port to prevent getting bottlenecked by the 12Gb/s maximum per port. It seems like a pretty good pick- although the RAID card is designed for larger RAID5 setups utilizing up to 64 HDDs rather than a 4 SSDs.
but the card comes with a 4 drive SAS to SATA fanout cable so I am ok there. I am looking at future proofing for a few years for with 12gbit. BTW, that card supports 12gbit per drive. Meaning technically if more were out there (and yes, there are commercial 12gbit drives) in terms of 12gbit drive availability, I could run 4 12gbit drives and not 2 6 gbit to make up the 12gbit. Remember 12gbit is 1.2 gigabytes/second. So, technically, I can run up to speeds of 4.8 gigabytes per second with 4 sata 12gbit drives and the card is a pci-e 3.0 8x. So it's one way bandwidth is 8 gigabytes/sec or 16 gigabytes bi directional. So, for me, I am not using all of the bandwidth available to the card. But SAS multipliers would fill that bandwidth in a hurry. As for me, I will be using 4 sata 6 gbit (600mb/sec.) drives for a total of 2.4 gigabytes per second max. Like I said, a little future proofing for a few years until sata 12gbit's limits are maxed out, I should be fine. Anyhow, Sata express is taking centre stage right now with z97 mb's. I thought we were making our pc's less cluttered with smaller cables. Not with sata express, we got one wide connector with 3 small ones. DUH?
