SATA II and SAS RAID CARD ROUNDUP

Promise Technology SuperTrak EX16300

Promise Technology has been around for a long time as well.  Although not involved in the enterprise storage segment, they've made a name for themselves as a premier provider of storage solutions for workstations and home/power users.  They were one of the first to deliver affordable PATA RAID controllers to end-users, as well as UDMA-133 HBAs when most motherboards only supported ATA-66/100.  Now, they've engineered a new class of RAID controllers, approaching the power and feature set of enterprise-class products.  The SuperTrak EX16300 is a 16-port SATA 3.0 Gb/s RAID card with pretty impressive specifications. 

Manufacturer's specifications:

SuperTrak EX16300 Highlights

• 16-Port Serial ATA (SATA) RAID controller with 3.0 Gb/s per port
• PCI-X 64-Bit/133MHz Host Bus Interface
• Support RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and JBOD
• Linux open source driver support
• Online capacity expansion and RAID level migration to add capacity as needed
• Hardware- accelerated RAID 6 Capable for maximum reliability
• Intel IOP331 XScale I/O processor
• Multiple logical drive support
• Automatic/manual rebuild of hot spare drive
• PerfectRAID technology for robust error handling and recovery
• Battery backup module optional

Promise has an excellent browser-based RAID management application called "Promise Array Manager".  It is very intuitive and informative, one of the best ones in this roundup.  This is the product of years of working with non-enterprise users, a nearly-idiot-proof interface:

Here are the benchmark results:

Hardware RAID-0, 32k Stripe, HD Tach 3.0 8MB Zones

Hardware RAID-0, 32k Stripe, HD Tach 3.0 32MB Zones

Hardware RAID-0, 32k Stripe, ATTO Mark

Hardware RAID-0, 128k Stripe, HD Tach 3.0 8MB Zones

Hardware RAID-0, 128k Stripe, HD Tach 3.0 32MB Zones

Hardware RAID-0, 128k Stripe, ATTO Mark

Hardware RAID-1,  HD Tach 3.0 8MB Zones

Hardware RAID-1,  HD Tach 3.0 32MB Zones

Hardware RAID-1, ATTO Mark

Hardware RAID-5, 32k Stripe, HD Tach 3.0 8MB Zones

Hardware RAID-5, 32k Stripe, HD Tach 3.0 32MB Zones

Hardware RAID-5, 32k Stripe, ATTO Mark

Hardware RAID-5, 128k Stripe, HD Tach 3.0 8MB Zones

Hardware RAID-5, 128k Stripe, HD Tach 3.0 32MB Zones

Hardware RAID-5, 128k Stripe, ATTO Mark

Hardware RAID-6, 32k Stripe, HD Tach 3.0 8MB Zones

Hardware RAID-6, 32k Stripe, HD Tach 3.0 32MB Zones

Hardware RAID-6, 32k Stripe, ATTO Mark

Hardware RAID-6, 128k Stripe, HD Tach 3.0 8MB Zones

Hardware RAID-6, 128k Stripe, HD Tach 3.0 32MB Zones

Hardware RAID-6, 128k Stripe, ATTO Mark

Hardware RAID-10, 32k Stripe, HD Tach 3.0 8MB Zones

Hardware RAID-10, 32k Stripe, HD Tach 3.0 32MB Zones

Hardware RAID-10, 32k Stripe, ATTO Mark

Hardware RAID-10, 128k Stripe, HD Tach 3.0 8MB Zones

Hardware RAID-10, 128k Stripe, HD Tach 3.0 32MB Zones

Hardware RAID-10, 128k Stripe, ATTO Mark

Hardware RAID-50, 32k Stripe, HD Tach 3.0 8MB Zones

Hardware RAID-50, 32k Stripe, HD Tach 3.0 32MB Zones

Hardware RAID-50, 32k Stripe, ATTO Mark

Hardware RAID-50, 128k Stripe, HD Tach 3.0 8MB Zones

Hardware RAID-50, 128k Stripe, HD Tach 3.0 32MB Zones

Hardware RAID-50, 128k Stripe, ATTO Mark

Software RAID-0, ATTO Mark