Raid Controller Cards (Recommendations)

[z0ki]

Hey guys, i've decided to ditch the SATA ports on the motherboard and give a good controller card a go, and simply use the on-board controllers purely for storage devices, and have my SSD's for Mac OSX and Windows 7 or 8. Before you ask Mac OSX? Well yes i've made a hackintosh out of my beast rig 😄 (made a thread of it in the motherboards section if you're interested and will be updated in a few days on "How To")

So basically i'll want 4 ports extra as i want to have 2 SSD's for Mac OSX, and 2x SSD's for Win 7 or 8, in Raid 0 more than likely and for benching 🙂

And because i've never used a controller card before, I am curious to know if i should go with a PCI 3.0 one for more bandwidth?

Does a controller card actually provide better performance & reliability then on-board controllers?

How is cable management on these things, atm it looks to be pretty crap! lol

Which card would you choose from the site listed below? The $245 one is probably the maximum i would go in regards to costs, but not sure if its a good choice or if there is one similar or better on the site for less?

http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=210_385&vk_sort=4

Are those cards actually hardware raid? I ask because i read somewhere on another forum that some controller cards are not really hardware raid, but still software raid, or use too much cpu?

[tannerdr]

I thought (Trim) was not supported using Pci express!

[WeRNothiNg]

I have no idea, but a friend of mine added a PCIe SAS/Sata raid controller and is running 2 120gb SSDs as cache for his sqata and SAS hdds. huge difference in system performance.