| SCSI or SAS is way over the top for what you're wanting. If I understand correctly, you're really looking for near-line storage. As Gizmo says, hardware RAID tends to be more reliable, but slightly slower. If you need every gram of performance you can squeeze out of a disk array, then software RAID is the way to go. This doesn't sound like the scenario you're facing, so hardware RAID may be more useful.
The downside of hardware RAID is that the controller card is generally fairly expensive. LSI do a range of SATA/SAS controllers (note that SAS controllers can generally talk SATA as well as SAS, but SATA controllers don't generally talk SAS) in various bus configurations, ranging from 4 ports up to 16 ports.
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