That's too bad. These two WD RE drives have served me well in software RAID 1 under CentOS up until a year ago when I still ran VMware Server.
The LSI controller was initially intended for a FreeNAS setup. It so happens that I acquired two, and so came about my attempt to use one of them in IR mode for local VMware storage.
I have been considering getting two Samsung SM863 drives to use in RAID 1. I would assume that SSDs, while likely not being able to reach their full potential in such a non-cached hardware scenario, would fare much better than mechanical drives in this same situation. If anyone has experience with this I'd love to hear about it!
The SM863 have super capacitor secured on-drive cache. Would this SSD cache also be completely disabled, and/or performance crippled, when connected to an LSI 9212-4i4e without cache and configured in a RAID 1 array?
The cost of two SM863 would be similar to that of a new RAID controller with cache and BBU, which makes the SSD alternative much more appealing.
Strictly speaking I don't think my home server / hobby project absolutely requires RAID 1. I'd be better off with a proper backup solution. The potential failure of a single SSD is something I can live with, as long as my backups are in order.