For a software RAID like this, you don’t want a hardware RAID controller, per se – you just want a bunch of ports. After my recent controller failure, I decided to try one of these. It’s slick as hell, sitting close to the motherboard, and seems rock solid so far. We’ll see!
I’m a happy btrfs user, but it’s most definitely a great thing to see what seems like a really clean implementation like this that is able to learn from the many years of collective experience with ZFS and btrfs.