3WARE 9690SA-4I 4 Port SATA/SAS RAID 0/1/5/6/10/50 Low Profile Controller Card PCI-E8

Comment:
I have been using a Highpoint RR3520 for half a year now so I had some high expectations for this product because many members on the forum claimed that 3ware cards are better than Highpoint's.My configs:8x1TB RAID 5 p RR35204x160GB RAID 5 p 9690SA-4IFor some reason there are occasional error reports in the event viewer regarding 3ware driver. Disabling software NCQ on the RAID unit seems to be the solution.Also, HDTune gives a strange burst rate for the 3ware RAID: 88 MB/s on 4 disk RAID 5 compared to 360 MB/s on 8 disk RAID 5. Anyway these numbers have very little meaning in actual use; I just can't help noticing them.Other than that, this is a good buy. Good performance from a trustworthy brand.Update: after some use I discovered that the software will not display a warning message in Windows 7 64-bit. This concerns me since I need to know immediately when a drive has failed or a unit has gone wrong. This review was modfied by poster @ 10-17-09 07:20 PM

Comment:
All in all i would gives this card a rating of 9/10. If it were not for the slightly poor linear performance it would be a winner. Since this card is a SAS supported card you can connect much more than 4 drives using a sas expander (up 128). If anyone is looking at getting a hardware raid card. I would get this one if your looking to make a database server or any other application requireing random io performance. If it's for a video editing workstyation or anything else requiring linear performance i would look at the lineup from areca.