Hardware raid obsolete
A hardware raid card is essentially a tiny PC on a card with it's own cpu, RAM, BIOS, raid software, etc - that is the reason they are expensive. You are buying a tiny PC.
Long ago a server's cpu was weak and you needed to offload I/O to raid cards. Today a server multi core cpu has plenty of power and you dont need to offload I/O anymore. For instance, to run ZFS on a single core, costs something like 2-3% of cpu power. That is nothing, so typically a raid card has 800 MHz 32 bits PowerPC cpu, and yes they are very weak.
Also a server might have 16-32 GB of RAM, whereas a raid card might have 256-512 MB RAM. A server is vastly superior in all aspects, so why dont you run your raid software on the server instead? Use software raid such as ZFS, and you get superior protection and performance. No 800MHz raid cpu can outclass a multicore 2.7GHz server cpu. So, who buys raid cards today? They are obsolete. Use software raid instead. Sell your raid card, and switch to open sourced software raid instead, and save money and gain performance.