Reliable RAID Card; RAID volumes v. drives?

[percival504]

I am trying to find a reliable Sata 6 / SAS Raid Card. My budget is up to $1k. I have researched a few cards, but, other than LSI, most of them seem to have significant incidence of failure. Any suggestions?

I assume that when using hardware RAID one must use whole disks; however, I have created RAID arrays out of volumes using disk utility. Is my assumption correct?

TIA.

 

[wonderspark]

Areca RAID cards

Provantage sells them. Here's an external model well within your budget range.

Mine (older version but still awesome) has been magnificent.

 

[CaptainChunk]

Generally speaking, Areca and ATTO are the best RAID cards that work in Macs. Both products are known to be very reliable and have good manufacturer support.

ATTO is the more expensive of the two, but they do have US-based support (easy to reach by phone), whereas Areca's support is generally limited to email because they're based in Taiwan. But you can't really go wrong either way - both companies include excellent configuration utilities with their cards.