I have recent experience telling me that not all products, or even most products, are universally available. I can order from a US site until I'm blue in the face, they still will not ship to Europe, or even anyway 'off shore'. Even if the offer is made to pay the shipping charges. Ergo, the assumption is improperly made.
I have used FastTrack 33,66, 100, and 133, as well as the SX6000. Yes, there are better RAID cards out there. No, they are not always available. Promise RAID is better than software RAID, I've actually done the head-to-head comparison, under production conditions, with Win2K Advanced Server.
The main reason is that a system cannot boot from Software RAID, wthout the expense of admin magicry. Such wizard games are anathema to real production environments. Even the limited RAID available from Promise lets you boot from the array. For production envirnments using RAID, this is crucial. I've done it the other way, on HP T520's with ServiceGard, using an EMC RAID array. The HP had to boot from a local drive and it was NOT RAID. I don't have the time to detail all the problems but, it was a miserable failure. Not being able to boot from the array is a real problem.
BTW, I do prefer the 3ware RAID controllers, when I can get them. But, once committed to a controller, in an environment, I declare it a standard. I usually buy board-sets 5 at a time, for the volume discount, and different boards per host also create a helluva maintenance problem.
BTW, paragraphs are good.
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