On 05/08/2016 06:51 PM, Valeri Galtsev wrote: > In the > past LSI would be my definite second choice, and 3ware was winning me only > by their transparent web interface. 3ware had a much more pleasant web UI and CLI, but their hardware was terribly unreliable and their performance was pretty awful, too. Today, your options with hardware controllers are mostly LSI with its gawd-awful management software, or Adaptec, or Areca. I rarely see the latter controllers anywhere. They tend to be less expensive than LSI, but they don't benchmark as well, and their smaller market share may fuel doubt about their future prospects. And that, I think, underscores a larger point that people try to make in these conversations, which is: There is no rational case to group hardware RAID controllers together and discuss them exclusively. There are pros and cons to each specific product family and no single quality that disqualifies discussion of other options. That is, the differences between an LSI card and an Adaptec card are no less significant than the differences between an LSI RAID array and a software defined array. My take is this: RAID should not be part of your long-term planning. Everything that's not SAN is moving to software defined storage. Microsoft is moving to Storage Spaces. The UNIX world is moving toward ZFS and btrfs. There are a number of reasons, including hierarchical storage and hybrid storage. Most significant in my opinion though is that while most RAID type can detect spontaneous bit flips, they cannot repair them. You may not use ZFS or btrfs today, but you should definitely be looking at these, long term.