External RAID Storage

AMCC/3Ware Sidecar

The read performance of the Sidecar is mostly on par with that of the Accusys iRAIDer, but 3Ware loses ground on write performance, where it is approximately 15% slower. Another issue to consider might be performance on degraded RAID 5 arrays: 3Ware is considerably slower in this area.

There also is another advantage of AMCC over Accusys: the controller card is more compact, and hence can also be installed into low-profile rackmount servers. Unfortunately, the three-year warranty only applies to the controller card; the Sidecar only has a one-year warranty.