and indeed, I'm eventually after an 8-port but am already using 8 drives, I'm really after a 12-port, but their cost is huge (though granted, better value than the smaller cards by far)
Well, they work fine, but spending that much on S-ATA ports only is absurd, since you could just get some cheap host cards that would do the same job for far less cost. Since I'm not using SSDs yet, I run 6 S-ATA ports off the PCI bus for my server's hard drives. They cost me less than the current value of a 750GB HDD between them. Compare that to the cost of five 1.5TB drives for an 8-port RAID card.
Not at all, they're just more cost-effective that way - most of the time you can't get get big controller cards unless they also have good RAID functionality. The only cheap ones you tend to get are 2 or 4 port PCI cards, which are limited to the PCI bus's 133MB/s combined throughput. Fine for 1 or maybe 2 drives, for 6 it's a bit iffy, but fine as long as they're not in use all at once.
