Testing RAID controllers is a daunting and unrewarding task. Although the process can be automated well enough, it takes a very long time. There are too many long tests producing too many numbers. But as we have already tested as many as six SAS RAID controllers of the latest generation, one from each major brand, we can’t miss the opportunity to throw them all together into a comparative review.

Right now, the market is calm. Existing controllers cope with today’s loads well enough. The PCI Express bus has ousted PCI-X while the serial interfaces SAS and SATA have replaced the parallel SCSI and PATA. The SAS 2.0 interface is going to boost bandwidth from 3 to 6Gbps but it is not anywhere near as yet, so the manufacturers have some time to catch their breath and release firmware updates to solve various bugs and optimize performance. We have to confess that we will compare the controllers with those firmware versions that were the newest at the time of our acquiring and testing them. Perhaps this is not quite correct as the controllers tested most recently have an advantage, but we don’t have an opportunity to test as many as six controllers all at the same time.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/sto...s-roundup.html