3WARE 9650SE-2LP Internal Sata II Hardware Raid Controller Card. Pci-express X1, Review

This is the fourth RAID cart I've owned from 3ware. All others worked perfectly and prior to this purchase, I've recommended their products to many. Not any more.

One of the great things about PCs are they are based on an architecture, where parts are interchangeable as long as the interfaces are comparable. So if you have a 3GB SATA drive you can plug it into any 3GB SATA port and it just works. Certainly some motherboards and interface cards will have cool special features that only work with certain parts and if you plug in something that doesn't support the cool special feature, you can't use the feature, but the component still just works.

But not with this card. Not by a long shot. There is a SHORT list of hard drives that will work with this card. And if you plug in a drive that doesn't work, you have to push it hard, I mean really hard to discover that it doesn't work. I'm using Ubuntu and I kept getting controller crashes after several hours of constant coping of data to the drives I had connected. Finally their tech support admitted that this is what happens when you don't use a drive on their short comparability list. Fortunately I discovered this problem before I lost any data.

Whatever feature is causing the card to crash like this needs to be automatically turned off by the card if the drives don't support it. A card this expensive should never leave finding comparability issues to when you need the card the most.

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Product Description:
3 Ware 9650SE SATA II hardware RAID controllers deliver industry-ieading RAID 6 and RAID 5 performance, robust fault tlerance, and multi-terabyte capacities. A PCI Express host interface, Multi-lane connectivity, StorSwitch architecture, and sophisticated SATA II features drive this unrivaled performance. The 3ware 9650SX offers the most comprehensive line of PCI Express controllers, available in both low profile and full height footprints with 2,4,8,12,16 and 24 port configurations. All 4 port and above models feature 3 Ware is award-winning Multi-lane connectivity. The 9650SE supports RAID levels 0,1,5,6,10,50,Single Disk and JBOD.

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