OK I found a list of those ... the 9265-8i or 9266-8i looks to be in my price range with 1GB of DDR3 - does RAM amount really matter in this case and is cachecade worth looking into also? I have a spare Crucial 256GB SSD laying around.
edit: I also see the 9267-8i is also in the range... I can't really see that there is any difference between these other than maybe port placement? Anyone have any idea as to differences?
don't know anything about cachecade so no comment on that one...
at least with older generation RAID controllers, the cache made a huge difference if the data set you're working on came out of cache for random I/O. but if your I/O patterns are larger, or sequential and larger, the cache size didn't make much difference. in fact, i found for large sequential I/O, I would gain more performance by using Write-Through cache. those controllers usually had 512MB or 1GB cache and the $$$ difference isn't that great now for older generation RAID hardware; i would get the 1GB just for S&G.
yeah, a lot of different models but most of them are basically the same, other than what you mentioned in terms of port configuration. LSI some times would use a different number if the card was made for OEM like IBM, Dell, HP, etc., so hardware wise they seem to be the same.