Megaraid SAS 9260-16I Single, 16-Port Int, 6GB/S Sata+SAS, Pcie 2.0, 512MB; in T

I needed lots of reasonably reliable storage for a disk-based backup solution. So far, this card, teamed with several Hitachi 3TB CoolSpin drives, seems like it will fit the bill VERY nicely. Initially, I was worried about using non-RAID Edition drives, but it's been running smoothly for more than 7 days (5 - 3TB drives in RAID 6 in a Norco RPC 4220 case, soon to be expanded with several more drives). No problems running this setup so far - zero array rebuilds, the drives were recognized right away, hot-swapping works, etc. I've swapped in some other desktop SATA drives (80 GB, pulled from workstations) and tested out some RAID 5 arrays, and those worked great as well.These drives I'm using aren't the fastest, but the hardware raid in this card has seemed to do a good job getting decent perf. CrystalDiskMark on the 5-disk RAID 6 array produces the following measurements (all in MB/s):Sequential -- 404 read, 109 write512 K -- 62 read, 23 write4 K -- .85 read, .37 write4 K QD32 -- 5.92 read, .70 writeFor my application, I need capacity more than super-fast disks, so this works great.It does seem to run a bit warm, but that's based on nothing but my hand coming in contact w/ the heat sink. The Norco case has a lot of fan power, so I don't think it will be a problem in my application.

I have always liked these LSI (Avago) RAID controllers. I now have 2 of these. The first one was working so great, I had to replace another brand in another server with this. Will definitely be purchasing more LSI controllers as the need arises. They have great performance with SATA, SAS, and SSD drives. I have a server with a RAID 50 with 6 SSD's... that thing flies! Easy to use management software in Windows. Do not like the interface that you have to use during the boot to create the first logical drive. That software is very clunky, but it gets the job done. I only recommend using it when you have to. Otherwise, install and run the management software in the OS. It is much easier to use.

Fast, affordable, works great in Win7 64 box with 16 4TB hard drives. Nice management software - no issues after 9 months.