suggestions for SATA RAID cards

[Barkley Vowk]

Little late to the game on this post...

I've had several 3ware boards, and I've been satisfied with all of them up 
until the move to sata. I've had nothing but problems with the sata 
boards, partly because the sata connectors are useless. The vibration 
of having a whole pile of disk in a rack can be enough vibration to cause 
connections to fail. Partly because some bugs in the firmware have bitten 
me a couple times. Mostly problems with the 3ware boards not flagging 
intermittant disks as bad.

I recently changed my big production boxes to areca boards, and I've been 
wildly happy with them. I've even had the misfortune of testing the 
hot-swap and rebuild capabilities, and it has worked great every time. 
(except for when you press ctl-d to end the cli session). I've had 24 
disks on 3 areca boards being seriously abused for about 6 months now, and 
they've been great. If you can afford the big cache versions, its well 
worth the extra coin, they really fly.

If you are going to do anything that requires reliability however, you'll 
want to get some hot-swap disk cages (I used supermicro CSE-M35T-1's), so 
you've got good cooling, and then use hot glue to secure all those 
useless, utterly fucking brain-damaged sata connectors in place. You should 
never need to remove the sata connectors again, so use enough glue to make 
sure that even god himself will have to pull out a putty knife and curse 
your soul before he can make changes. You'll thank me later.