On Thu, 30 Mar 2006, Mark Hahn wrote:

quoted

3ware.  Period.  If you're going to use md, get the 8506-4 series rather
than either of the 9xxx series cards.

before the 9550, I never found attractive in price/performance:
expensive as hell and a lot slower than MD.  but the 9550 is really
quite impressive...

I'd still recommend 3ware for the md case, because of reliability. For my 
6-disk raid a 8506-4 was actually slightly faster than two sil3114s 
running md raid5. The 3ware card has the additional advantage of not 
pushing the machine into a hard hang once per day or so when doing io over 
the raid layer.

You're right though in that the hw raid performance was rather bad until 
the 9550.

/Mattias Wadenstein