Cris;

One of the questions that I don't believe has been asked yet is why? Why do you want to use raid5? I currently have both the Promise SX6000 and a 3ware RAID 5 controller sitting on the bench. I don't think I'll every go that route again. The cost of harddrives has drop so much that I no longer feel the need to use something as complex as raid 5 for a hardware backup solution. 320gb drives warranted for 5 years are available for $80.00 USD. Why not just go RAID1 or use a large usb drive to backup your data?

Through the course of my usage of the above two controllers I had a few problems. The promise card declared non-existent simultaneous multiple hard drive failures. Not a good thing. Deleting and recreating the array without initialization saved the day but the pucker factor was huge. The 3ware would rebuild the raid1 array I had on it from time to time. I had both a raid5 and a raid1 running on this controller.

At any rate in todays world with the low cost of storage is this really the best solution?