I was looking more recently into building a RAID-10 array for good drive performance and parity, and I started looking into hardware RAID cards. I was thinking I'd be paying under $100 for one, but it seems that the good ones run anywhere from $300 to $500. Why is this so? What about a hardware RAID card makes it so expensive?
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It's an indirect effect. There used to be cheaper, less capable solutions ($100), too. However, in that segment they couldn't compete with software RAID solutions. Therefore, only the high-end cards remain viable products.
What makes a card high-end? As sblair already mentioned, NVRAM. Another common feature is a dedicated chip to run the RAID algorithms, offloading the main CPU. Hot-pluggability. Quick rebuild features. Caches.
MSalters
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There are not a lot of good reasons for home users to be using raid levels (other than 0, 1 or 10) that require a hardware raid card. Therefore there is not a lot of demand in the consumer market. There is demand in the server/professional market however as it's used more in those kind of machines. However professional users have much more to spend compared to consumers.
I cannot imagine a reason to be using a hardware raid card at home, prices of harddisks are so low that you can easily create a raid 10 array instead of raid 5 which increases performance/durability but doesn't need any parity checks. If you're looking for speed an ssd (though still expensive) is a better way to go.
thekip
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