Originally posted by: MrCoyote
Those $30-50 PCI-e cards are not going to get you TRUE hardware RAID. They still offload the processing to the CPU. It's the same as on-board RAID.
Entry-level hardware RAID starts at $150 for dedicated I/O processor with X/OR offload and does not guarantee higher I/O performance than integrated RAID. There are many documented cases where integrated RAID has higher I/O performance than hardware RAID.
Hardware RAID offers guaranteed performance, not to be confused with higher or more or better performance. This merely means that whatever processing loads are placed on the system CPU, it won't affect your RAID performance (and vice versa).
The entry-level hardware RAID solutions are not all that good, actually. Figure at least $200 for decent hardware RAID controllers, $300 to break into the good ones, with great RAID solutions being higher still.
Don't get me wrong, good hardware RAID is nice, but is it $300 nice?