We are in the middle of a RAID controller review, so we picked one model that we believe will perform well for our RAID Charts project. The ARC-1220 by Areca has eight SATA/300 ports, supports NCQ, and comes with an integrated 256 MB DDR SDRAM cache memory and an Intel IOP333 engine for XOR/parity calculations. It utilizes a x4 PCI Express interface and is a half-height card, so it’s suitable for low-profile rackmount servers.

Our reasons for picking this card were its easy handling and ability to quickly initialize RAID arrays. However, we’re sure that most other 8-port SATA RAID controllers would do the job just as well.