Guys,

I've been thinking of using a hardware RAID ward for a pure storage setup. The idea is I would use a small harddisk (or maybe even boot from CD-rom/USB stick, not sure about that yet) in the pc/server for the OS, and then use a RAID 5 array for storage.

I'm now looking for a good RAID card. The reason I want to use a hardware card instead of software is two-fold: for one, I know RAID5 is a CPU intensive array setup. I want to minimize the speed drop and secondly, the idea is that, if I want to upgrade the server pc or maybe even migrate the storage RAID to a different machine, it would be as easy as physically transferring the drives, installing the card and its driver and voila, the data is back but on another pc/server.

I'm asking for your help because it's been years since I've focussed on hardware RAID cards. Last time I looked, SCSI-2 was actually still popular, go figure. I have no idea which cards are still considered to be good cards. I'm sure Adaptec still makes good cards, but there might also be good alternatives I know nothing about. That's why I'm asking for your help.

Basically I want a good, speedy hardware RAID card for SATA disks. I guess I will need about 8 connectors on it. External SATA port may also be handy for connecting this type of device in case I still need more storage.

Good driver compatibility for the card is obviously a must, not only for windows, but also for Linux, since I may try and set up an OpenFiler server and try its iSCSI feature.

A last thing I want to ask is: Are hardware RAID controllers still as picky about the drives used as they were 'in the old days'? With this I mean: I've read about dedicated NAS devices like the Synology CS-407 with which is possible to 'upgrade' a RAID5 array by replacing the disks one by one and having the array rebuilt after each disk replacement. (eg. You've got 4x 500 GB, and after you replace them with 1TB disks one by one, you'll end up with a 4 TB RAID 5 array, well 3 TB of usable space). Is this also possible with nowadays RAID hardware RAID controllers? Or even better maybe, has it become possible maybe to add an extra disk to the array when you're running out of storage space maybe? (that would be cool)

Soooo... which controller(s) would you guys suggest?

Thanks!