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I agree, this Sun box is way over priced. In May, I received a simliar box for our lab from Atipa. Dual opteron, 24 x SATA II 500G SATA. I'm testing it in a RAID 60 configuration right now. I'm pulling over 350 MB/s at the application level. I'm using a pair of Areca raid 6 controllers (with real Open Source kernel support, thanks Eric Chen!) and striping them together with mdadm. It's amazingly fast. And with 500GB platters, I'm relieved to have N+2 redundency.

Ok, I realize it's a bad metaphor because you actually can throw a motherboard quite a distance. But here's another example of where things can go horribly wrong: How do they handle error conditions? On my desktop system, I'm running RAID-0 (with WD Raptor drives) for speed. Yes, I know what I'm doing (famous last words). No, I don't store any important data on my desktop (it's on a RAID-5 array on a server). Originally, I was using the Silicon Image 3114R on-board RAID controller included on my Asus A8N-SLI "Premium" motherboard. Eventually one of the drives died. The SI3114R responded to the problem by freezing and becoming unresponsive when a disk error occurred. Under DOS, Linux, or WinXP - the problem is not OS specific. The rest of the system works fine, but once it hits an error the SI3114R just stops working and returns nothing but errors to the OS. Now, since Asus doesn't update the SI3114R BIOS in their mobo BIOS updates (and I'm too lazy to hack my own), I don't know whether it's bad silicon, bad BIOS, or a bad design (my guess would be the latter). Accessing the drive's S.M.A.R.T. data indicates that the warning numbers were screamingly bad and probably were for some time.

So apparently the SI3114R doesn't monitor S.M.A.R.T. data, and it's error-handling capabilities fall somewhere between "shitty" and "non-existant". No big deal for me; I was only inconvenienced by having to re-install operating systems and applications.

The moral of this long-winded story is that you generally get what you pay for. This isn't the first bad experience I've had with on-board RAID controllers. If your data is important, then spend the appropriate money (think in terms of data replacement cost), do the appropriate research, and invest in a RAID setup that's right for your situation. If your protected data consists of anything more important than your Oblivion saved games, your mobo's RAID controller (or the $39 Fry's special) is probably the wrong choice.

And if anyone cares to know, I'm now using the NVRAID on the mobo (we'll eventually see if it handles failures more gracefully), and I use an Areca ARC-1110 on my server. I can attest that the Areca card does handle failures extremely well, albeit noisily.

The units you listed (at least the first few) look like a drive cage inside an external enclosure. I do not know where you can buy one of those pre-assembled, but you can get the three major parts easily enough and just put it together yourself.

5 drive cage (built in raid - IDE/SATA with IDE drives):
http://areca.us/products/html/ide-ide.htm

1394 to IDE bridge board:
http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/pg19_firewir ebridgeboards.htm

external 4 drive enclosure:
http://www.macgurus.com/productpages/scsi/mgscsien closures.php

if you don't already have drives, you could look here:
http://www.newegg.com/ProductSort/Category.asp?Cat egory=15

Alternately, you could get the areca unit and mount it inside the computer - just check that you have 3 free 5.25" drive bays without any protrusions.

I recently picked up one of the SCSI to SATA areca raid units and it has worked well so far - one of the fans went south, and they are shipping out a new one.

With RAID, you still have a single point of failure. Instead of it being your hard drive, it is now your RAID controller. So what is the advantage?

Since a RAID controller doesn't have moving parts, is it less likely than a hard drive to fail?

Oh I don't know, maybe try the company that makes them? Areca US [where to buy]. A whole 2 clicks from google.
/smartass

The review looks nice, I'm convinced. If I want to buy an Areca card in the US, where would I go?

Google doesn't help. Pricewatch doesn't help. Tom's Hardware didn't provide an answer that I could see. Nothing on eBay but palm trees. What appears to be the US distributor has a "Where to buy" link that points to the Taiwanese site which points to... the US distributor.

This solution looks very interesting to me.
http://www.areca.us/IDERAID.htm

It takes up 3 external 5.25" bays and allows you to connect 5 3.5" drives. It provides expandable RAID 5, all internally with it's hardware and simply looks like an ATA or SATA device to the computer.

Has anyone here actually used one?

kiwi

--

System Architecture

Toshiba TMPR4927ATB 200MHz 64-bit RISC processor
64MB on-board cache memory with ECC protection
Areca 5 channels IDE controller (ARC600-66) with enhanced H/W XOR engine
NVRAM for RAID configuration & transaction log
Write-through or write-back cache support
Firmware in Flash ROM for easy upgrades

RAID Features
RAID level 0, 1 (0+1), 3, 5 and JBOD
Multiple RAID selection
Array roaming
Online RAID level/ stripe size migration
Online RAID capacity expansion and RAID level migration simultaneously
Automatically and transparently rebuilds hot spare drives
Hot swap new drives without taking the system down
Instant availability and background initialization
Automatic drive insertion / removal detection and rebuilding

Disk Bus Interface
Ultra ATA/133 compatible
5 channels, operating in parallel
5 hot-swap drive trays
48-bit LBA support allows disk exceeding 137GB
Staggering the Spin-Up of Individual Disk to Solve the Power-on Surge

Host Bus Interface
ARC-5010
Dual ATA interface-Ultra ATA/133 & Serial ATA 1.0
Ultra ATA/133 compatible Transfer rate up to 133MB/sec
Serial ATA 1.0 - 1.5Gbps(150 MB/sec)

ARC-6010
Ultra 160-Wide LVD SCSI; Transfer rate up to 160MB/sec
Tagged Command Queuing
Concurrent I/O commands