Originally posted by: MearsWhy are silicon image cards so cheap?
Because they are cheap. You get what you pay for, even with software RAID cards. For example, you can take an array - let's say for the sake of argument a 2 drive RAID 0 - created on a FastTrak 66 and move it to a SuperTrak SX6000 and it will boot right up. Conversely, you can create an array on that SuperTrak SX6000 and boot it on the FastTrak 66.
Only thing that doesn't work is unsupported RAID modes (IE RAID 5 on a FastTrak 66) - it gets detected as RAID 0+1, but the data isn't in a useful state.
Does Silicon Image support this sort of movement between HBAs? I doubt it, they would advertise it if they did. The only ones I know of that guarantee it are Promise and 3ware.
If you're just one-offing a system array for your home computer, it probably doesn't matter. If you're wanting to create a data array to last for a while, you might want to consider what you would do if your HBA died and an exact replacement was not readily available...