RAID Controller Recommendations: ARC-1210 or 9650SE-4LPML

[Maxim Khitrov]

Hello,

I'm building a new workstation for myself, which will primarily run
FreeBSD 7.0+ and possibly dual-boot with Win XP for gaming. I'd like
to have at least a terabyte of redundant disk storage (probably
RAID5), so I'm trying to figure out which controller would give me the
best results.

My two main candidates are Areca ARC-1210, and 3ware 9650SE-4LPML.
Both are 4-lane SATA II controllers. Both cost about the same, and
from what I gather, both should be supported by FreeBSD. I read the
reviews, but would like to get some additional feedback specifically
for using the two under FreeBSD (maybe one has better drivers... I
don't know).

I plan to get Gigabyte's GA-P35-DQ6 motherboard (btw, any
compatibility issues I should know about?), which has a 4x PCIe slot.
ARC-1210 uses 8x, but since the physical size of the slot is actually
16x, there shouldn't be a problem. Don't think the controller will be
able to use 2GB/s of bandwidth to its limit anyway.

So that's basically my setup. I'd like to know if anyone here has
personal experience with either controller. Are there any stability
issues? Which one would give me best performance with 4 drives in
RAID5? Which one has more mature drivers? If you have some other
recommendations, I'm happy to hear those as well.

Thanks,
Maxim Khitrov