SAS hardware

[dlm1065]

I am setting up an low-midrange server and I am going to order a SAS controller and a drive.
Later I wll add drives to fully utilize the controller for now I just want to get the SAS working.

My am2+ mainboard is crossfire ready and has 3 pcie x16. Rumor has it that the chipset
on my mainboard is over optimized on the express side to the point that I/O on the
onboard chips is extremely bottlednecked hence the poor disk preformance.
I am hoping by putting a SAS contoller on the PCIe that I will utilize the optimization
and see the mainboard's preformance increaese.

I do not know much about SAS and especially which SAS work best with linux/Gentoo.

I have been looking at the following:
1)for the initial drive a ..Seagate ST373455SS Cheetah 73GB 15K RPM SAS internal 3.5 Inch 16MB hard drive New with 5yr manufacturer warranty -- ST373455SS
2)for the controller a ..3ware 9690SA-8I PCI-Express x8 Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) Controller Card RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and Single Disk

but a friend suggested:

1) for the initial drive ..Fujitsu MBA3300RC 300GB 15000 RPM 16MB Cache Serial Attached SCSI (SAS
2) for the controller a ..LSI Logic Controller Card MegaRAID SAS 8204ELP 4-Port 3Gb/s SAS/SATA PCIe - LSI00132

Can anyone tell me what is the best SAS preformance mix under Gentoo?

[zeek]

I have the Dell equilivant of the MegaRAID on 20+ servers and have never had a problem. All setups are plain RAID1.

Warnings: the driver support in the current 2007 livecd is half broken, depending on the MegaRAID firmware you may see sda as sdb, or you might see sda, sdb and sdc where sdb and sdc are the individual drives in the RAID1. The driver support in current kernels is rock solid.