AMCC Storage 3ware 9690SA SAS/SATA RAID Controller

Results

So lets recap. My experience with this card has been wonderful. At the beginning, when I was installing the Operating Systems, I found that for the Microsoft Products I was required to insert the product cd to obtain drivers for the hardware. Ubuntu featured native driver support which was a very nice feature. From the test results, this card can be expected to perform quite well under the stress of an average server. The high efficiency cache and low write latency makes this card suitable for data center and or webserver usage. Overall, Windows Server 2008 featured higher bandwidth than Windows Vista. On the IO Zone tests, Linux was hands down the winner, but without other benchmarks to completely test this; I can still say that the performance I witnessed during the install and testing process was excellent. The commandline RAID interface is very standard, which is good if you are considering purchasing this product as it will be very similar, in this respect, to other cards on the market. Overall, I was extremely impressed.

Conclusions

In my experience, 3ware gear has always been top notch and the AMCC Storage 9690SA SAS/SATA RAID Controller is no exception. The the AMCC 9690SA provides consistent, quick performance and excellent reliability. This consistency implies that the AMCC 9690SA is well suited to a variety of roles in any server. From my experience of working with and testing this card, I am happy to say that it will make a nice addition to my own growing server farm. At an average selling price of about $500, somewhat cheaper than the competitors' cards, I would reccomend that anyone looking to put together a server farm give this card serious consideration.

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