Because of that (and because I already have FC infrastructure in place) I'm mostly interested in standalone disk enclosures doing their own raid with cheap sata drives and big caches with batteries.
I just ran across these today:
<http://www.synetic.net/Synetic-Products/SyneRAID-Units/SyneRAID6-16-3U/SyneRAID6-SATA.htm>
No experience with them, but they're the best specs I've seen for SATA external RAID - decent processor and NCQ support.
We've had good luck with the LSI Megaraid 320-2X and 320-4X SCSI cards. The older, non "X" cards don't use the newer Intel xscale chips and really can't keep up for RAID-5 based on the testing I did.
I've seen pretty poor RAID-5 performance from an LSI SATA card, the 150-6. It uses one of the older Intel i960 based IOP chips.
-David --- Cyrus Home Page: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyruswiki.andrew.cmu.edu List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html