On a card like the LSi, the RAID5 scores are damned near the RAID0 scores, we're talking more than 450,000 IOPS no matter which way you go (so long as you have enough drives underneath to sustain it.) The extra cost for the Fastpath driver I believe is only necessary for using an array of SSD's to cache an array of spindle disks; I think I can skip that if I'm doing only pure SSD. But I can't tell for sure from the documentation...
As for 96GB of ram? You'd have to buy buffered+ECC stuff, and you'd need multiple CPU sockets for that qty of ram, which means multiple XEON processors and of course a board that supported all of that. That's going to be FAR MORE than my storage solution, sorry... And WTF would I do with overclocks on a rig like that? Nothing, that's what.
I'd rather have the fastest single consumer-grade CPU that I can overclock the piss out of, a damned nice consumer-grade motherboard that will let me, a huge fistful of consumer-grade ram that can run at some good timings and 1T, and spend $2k on a ~1.5GB/sec, 400,000+ IOPS, ~1TB storage array. I mean, we're talking even faster than the fastest REVODrive at that point. As for which raid mode? I dunno, we'll see when I get there
As for a huge ramdisk? Sure, I'll probably get 32GB of ram and have an 8Gb scratch space for temp and pagefile (some older apps absolutely require a pagefile.) I have a similar thread to that somewhere else on this forum where I'm already doing such a thing for other reasons. But I'm not going to be man-handling NTFS junctions and shit while copying data around to my ramdrive and then back out to disk -- that's absurd.
I have several hundred GB of games; continuously moving the ones I want in and out of ram can bite me.
Edit: I'll be buying the battery backup unit because it's
required to enable write-back caching. I mean, we're talking about SSD's, what's the one thing they don't always perform well on? In fact, I'd likely config the card to use the cache
only for write-back, as read-ahead on an SSD array this big would be of likely NO benefit.