As long as Adaptec don't publish the source code of the drivers it's as useless for the typical linux user as the half baked semi-Raid hardware in today's desktop.

Anytime you want to upgrade your Linux machine you are stuck waiting for Adaptec to catch up with it's driver development and compile.

If you are a linux user then go with 3Ware

http://www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata2-9650.asp

3ware publishes the drivers in sourcecode form, which makes it easy for you to use them on any linux version or kernel and they are also integrated (because of the availability of the sourcecode) in CentOS, RHEL, ... distributions.

When you sell hardware RAID solutions, it must be hard to accept that free open source software RAID solutions exist, and that have much better data integrity.

Black boxes, move over, ZFS is here.

http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/

Isn't this device _hardware_ RAID? i.e. totally transparent to the OS. So no need for the Linux fraternity to beaver away writing drivers etc. Not unless you want to that is.

RAID 0, 1, or 10 - bah

RAID 0 lose a drive lose all your data

RAID 1 - a good backup is better - more cost effective and you can (in concept) recover [many?] previous versions of your data.

RAID 10 - at least if you lose a drive you dont lose all your data.

If your doing Hardware RAID - and NOT using RAID 3, 5 or "higher" you are

spinning your own platters.

Great, looked in lots of common UK e-shops and none of them list XFX Revo64.

It's as if it doesn't exist.

Adaptec makes hardcore rock-solid RAID controllers that more or less look like SCSI cards to an OS. 78xx & 79xx require a driver module. So does 3Ware, so does Intel or AMD or Nvidia or VIA or SiS disk controllers. The work is done in the hardware even though a driver is required.

Software RAID off-loads the calculations to the CPU.

What exactly are all you people disputing about?

You sound like a typical home user who hasn't thought of enterprise requirements, or maybe you just figure that bigger is better.

RAID is not an alternative to backups, they deal with different problems. If your service must be highly available you need redundant hot-swappable hardware to survive hardware failure (in this case a disk). Backups mean nothing if you lose business because of downtime. RAID cannot replace backups either. If you notice you accidentally deleted something a month ago RAID won't help you.

RAID10 is the only viable option for high performance systems, especially where lots of writes are involved. I'd only consider RAID5 or 6 where performance is not a major consideration, such as HD based backups.