I have a server with 12 harddisk slots, currently using an Areca ARC-1231ML card, with a large RAID-6 spanning 8 disks and a few passthroughs.
The tiny CPU on that board is obviously not capable of handling this setup, and I get approximately 100 MB/s write speed after caches are full, and the passthrough disks also suffer in that case.
So I'd like to replace that card. The new card should have
- battery backed up write cache (the workload is heavy on small writes, as this is a continuous integration server)
- 12 SATA ports
- acceptable write speed on RAID-6 (I'd expect 1 GB/s sustained)
- automated biweekly consistency checks
- ideally, a way to import an existing RAID-6 from an Areca RAID setup to spare me an annoying manual migration.
- if it can use an SSD as a read cache transparently, that is a huge bonus
The main difficulties are probably the speed requirement and the import functionality.
