I've had great success with Adaptec and LSI SAS controllers with SATA drives attached.
Two I'm using now are, off the top of my head, an LSI 3442e and and an Adaptec 3405. In the case of the LSI 3442e, I'm using it to drive 4 SATA drives on a Dell SC440 because I found the Dell server's onboard SATA controller to be worthlessly slow. It'd max out at 15 or 20 MB/sec. The LSI can do 200 MB/sec easy when driving the same drives (four Seagate ST3500620AS 500GB drives). -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
