The Power to Serve

If a motherboard goes bad on a server with a PCI-based controller, the user loses access to the RAID. In the same situation with an independent controller, the user simply needs any machine with an inexpensive SCSI card to which to attach the RAID. Access may be temporarily slowed, but it is there.

More drive channels equals faster throughput. RAID strips data onto a series of drives simultaneously. By doing this, it takes advantage of the combined speed of the drives.