Choosing a sata RAID controller

Looking for recommendations for a sata raid controller to control a group of 4 western digital 10k raptor hard drives.

This could either be:
A single RAID 10 array for performance + speed (I've never used raid 10)
or
A RAID 1 array for data archive every night
A RAID 0 array for outright performance dealing with large corel and photoshop files throughout the day
Possibly another RAID 0 array for printer spool and scratch disk (better to separate scratch from work disk, or having even more disks in a single raid-0 array?)

 

Adaptec are stable -- they build server grade for years (reputation built on scsi and scsi raid server adapters and controllers). The Adaptec 2820SA adapter has been a reliable workhorse so far.

3ware became famous for their SATA raid controllers and are a benchmark in the industry for sata raid specifically.

Areca has a following now for it's blazing fast sata raid performance -- it's possibly the most recommended on forums like forums.2cpu.com for example.

 

Even though there is a negligable performance advantage and it's expensive per MB, I like the simplicity of RAID-1. In a worst case you're not totally dependent on the raid controller and as long as the controller doesn't corrupte the data in failure, either drive of the raid-1 set can be simply read on another controller if necessary.

 

i recommend 3ware.........

Ricky Anderson

 

Since my 2007 reply in this thread, I've actually rediscovered 3ware controllers due to compatibility problems with both my adaptec 2820 sata and 31205 sas controllers with the new seagate 1.5 TB drives. I also had to give up the simplicity of good old RAID1 as I needed more throughput than it could offer so I'm running RAID 10 now and will probably give RAID5 another go in 2009 for the next archive array...