I have a quick question regarding what I'm seeing as an obstacle in getting the proper performance out of a RAID card...
I'm interested in setting up two RAID arrays (a RAID0 of 2 disks, and a RAID1 of another 2 disks), and am looking at a hardware RAID solution. I am interested in the LSI 9260-4i in particular.
Now my question is this: this RAID card is advertised as having 6Gbps SATA support. What I don't get though is that as a PCI-E 2.0 x8 card, it should theoretically top-off at 8 Gbps - so I don't get how it can support 4 (or, depending on the model, 8) channels of 6Gbps drives.
Basically, I want to create a 2x RAID0 array of 6Gbps drives (OCZ Vertex 3 240GB), and a 2x RAID1 array of 6Gbps drives (WD Velociraptor 600GB). I realize that neither of these disks takes full advantage of the 6.0Gbps SATA III interface, but they do exceed the 3.0Gbps SATA II interface specifications by a nice amount even in standalone configurations.
So I don't understand how this card can support ~8Gbps (2x SSD in RAID0) + 4Gbps (2x WD in RAID1) without reaching the limits of the underlying interface.
Are there any PCI 2.0 x16 RAID cards available, because I couldn't find any... And I'm really not looking forward to buying two of these cards to pull this off, but if that's the only choice...