Adaptec SATA RAID card eliminates most limitations (Score 1)

I use the 2410SA on my system at home with 4 hitachi drives. It is great. The Adaptec card eliminates many of the raid limitations and makes it very simple to manage. It will handle different sized drives and still uitilize the full amount of space on each drive. It is plug and play in the sense it deals with all potential hassles. When a drive dies, you just put a new drive on, and it rebuilds the array silently in the background - while you are still using your machine. You can also migrate from one raid configuration to another with a click of a mouse. There is another hidden benefit to going with a RAID controller separate from the motherboard. You can replace the controller if it dies. If its integrated, you many times have to find an exact duplicate of your old motherboard to get your data off the drives. Exact means exact - same firmwares, hardware revisions. This can be hard, expensive, and time consuming. This is another reason to go with (expensive) Adaptec - there will always be a replacement available in case of failure. I use RAID 10, but would suggest RAID 5 for maxmimum safety and final array size.