Is there a RAID controller in the house?

Expensive RAID controllers used to be the domain of business. You just didn’t find powerful, expensive controllers and lots of noisy, hot, large disks in home machines.

However things seem to be changing. People are putting high-end RAID controllers into home machines, combining them with SSDs to produce massively fast machines which do not run incredibly hot or make lots of noise, making them suitable for home machines. They seem to be choosing the high-end controllers to match them up with the perceived high performance of their SSDs.

This poses a problem. All manufacturer’s RAID cards have traditionally been put in server system. They then rely on high-volume airflows within those machines to run air across the card’s heatsink to cool the card. Servers, especially rack-mount units, generally don’t have any problems with high air-flow volumes … but they have plenty of problems with noisy fans. You don’t generally find 2U rackmount servers in the family home.

With home machines the noise is a problem. There is traditionally not significant airflow at the card location within those chassis. If there are fans, they tend be aimed at the hard drives, not the expansion cards. So what are you doing to keep things cool? Do you have sufficient airflow across your card? What is the temperature of your card?

I’d be interested to know what’s happening out there.