This is just a random story
1.5 years ago I built myself a new "high-end" PC.
I used a Silicon Image SATA RAID1 (mirror) controller, similar to
this one. Cost about £30. It was pretty fast, but soon (not soon enough though) I found that the driver had a serious bug: it implemented the win32 FLUSH command a bit too literally, slowing down some apps 10x to 100x.
I put up with it... but when one of the drives started making a funny noise I thought I will sort out the crappy controller as well. I had already tried "support" but there isn't any support on anything from Silicon Image. UK, USA, nowhere.
So I bought an
Adaptec 2405 for about £100. I always used Adaptec stuff for systems I built at work, for SCSI connected tape drives etc, and it always worked - at a hefty price. Some of their SCSI controllers are £300.
The two new drives are of similar type to previous - 7200rpm SATA II, £40 each on Amazon, 500GB Seagate common as muck ones.
The performance is nothing short of dramatic. In all usage there is a several times speedup, and file writing in some apps has gone down from 10 secs to ~ 0.2 sec.
Of course this Adaptec controller does "more" than the SIIG piece of crap. It has 128MB on-board RAM and what looks like a fast processor to do the packet ordering etc. But the SIIG one (if one looks at the Silicon Image website, etc) claims to do all of that too, only using the PC memory, and on a ~ 3GHz PC it should work perfectly well.
Transferring one RAID1 system to another is easy enough if the old one is still running and you can boot into windoze. Insert the new Adaptec card, windoze finds new hardware and asks for the drivers, insert the driver CD, point windoze to the drivers, it installs them, install Trueimage (or some other disk cloning app but I like TI because it works absolutely as described) and clone the old HD to the new HD (the RAID1 mirror system looks like a single HD to windoze), then pull out the old controller, and bingo, windoze boots from the new HD.
TI does not notice the RAID or SATA systems; it just sees the "IDE" HDs. I actually did this with an old TI v8 which does not support SATA controllers. This was quite interesting and made the whole thing a bit easier. However if one uses TI for image backup/restore then a later version (v9 I think) is required for SATA controllers.
Doing this on a live windoze installation avoids the "F6" process with a 3.5" diskette which is needed if installing one of these controllers on a fresh system with no windoze; the RAID controllers all look like SCSI devices so windoze does not recognise them as IDE.
It was well worth the hour or two spent... and never again will I be buying cheap HD controllers again