Review on LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i 8-Port SAS RAID Controller by Cesar Carter

Use this with six 4TB SATA drives in RAID 6. Try it first, using the onboard WebBIOS I was able to set everything up in just minutes. It also helps that I don't have to worry about other devices being affected since they weren't connected to the same controller. One of those six drives was defective and I had a very annoying alarm letting me know. It took some time to figure out how to connect it. then I removed the bad drive. and the array continued to work as if nothing happened (this is how RAID 6 should work). I replaced the hard drive and started the recovery, but I estimate it will take many days. Using megacli on Linux, I set the restore speed to faster, but that only reduced the time slightly. so i just destroyed the array (it was still empty, i put the installation through its paces) and built a new one in just a few minutes, all with megacli (quite scary how easy it is to just destroy all the data, but that's always true). Best of all, the array has read/write speeds of >300MB/s and can seemingly handle multiple concurrent network accesses with ease. It also intelligently shuts down unnecessary hard drives, saving noise, heat and energy. You don't need to configure anything, this is done by default. I used mdadm for RAID 6 first. Same drives, 30MB/s, lots of configuration oddities. then I used software RAID on the board for fun and it wasn't much better (and only RAID 5). It's definitely worth a little more money. I have 16TB of storage with considerable endurance, $300 (drives, cables, controller and even a backup battery for the controller).