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I was looking more recently into building a RAID-10 array for good drive performance and parity, and I started looking into hardware RAID cards. I was thinking I'd be paying under $100 for one, but it seems that the good ones run anywhere from $300 to $500. Why is this so? What about a hardware RAID card makes it so expensive?
Yea I had the same problem. I got loads of PC's, even servers lying around but these raid cards are just that expensive. It is because they have built in processors to handle the data, organization, CRC all on the fly without denting your server(pc) at the fastest possible speed. Surprisingly I found the HP-Microserver that has 4 bays with RAID (not 10 though :( ) andthe server costs £200 - some 4port Raid cards cost £200..so the question is pretty valid. Are we paying for the brand only? or what.. – Piotr Kula – 2012-01-09T12:50:19.703
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Hardware RAID cards use relatively expensive NVRAM as a write cache, to ensure that no data is lost during a power failure.
– sblair – 2012-01-09T12:59:06.090RAID controllers have always been expensive... I think ppumpkin is slightly confused as you don't need a port per RAID card per drive... Unless using SATA (i think?!). SCSI you can have multiple drives per port (max is 7 i think?). But for multiple arrays then for each you would need a port. Think SAS can be upto 100 drives per port :) – HaydnWVN – 2012-01-09T13:05:51.667