Okay, spent a few hours making some speed tests between the two built in controllers.
I have stats to back up my words, but I don't feel like dragging out all the tests I did and splicing up the graphics/results. I may get to it later.
In a nutshell, with Windows 2008 RC1 64 Bit on a ASUS DSEB-15/SAS Board with 2 Xeon Quads;
- Intel Matrix controller is ever-so-slightly faster for SATA drives than the LSI Megaraid, but not enough to really worry about.
- ESX 3i 3.5 does see the Intel matrix controller, but doesn't see the RAID sets created on it - Just the individual drives.
It looks like you'll still need the SAS option for this board if you want to run RAID of any kind in ESX 3i 3.5
I have stats to back up my words, but I don't feel like dragging out all the tests I did and splicing up the graphics/results. I may get to it later.
In a nutshell, with Windows 2008 RC1 64 Bit on a ASUS DSEB-15/SAS Board with 2 Xeon Quads;
- Intel Matrix controller is ever-so-slightly faster for SATA drives than the LSI Megaraid, but not enough to really worry about.
- ESX 3i 3.5 does see the Intel matrix controller, but doesn't see the RAID sets created on it - Just the individual drives.
It looks like you'll still need the SAS option for this board if you want to run RAID of any kind in ESX 3i 3.5
