Areca 1210 questions

For those of you running this card, how long does it increase the BIOS portion of booting up? Have you tried it in an open ended/electrically PCIe x4 slot? Adequate bandwidth for a RAID 5 setup with 3 of those WD 640GB drives?

Thanks

I am currently running this card with 2 x velociraptors (raid 0) and am extremely happy with it. I originally got this b/c I was running into a short latency issue with onboard Intel iCHR9. My system is extremely stable now and there is a noticeable boost in performance. I have HD tune/tach bench results to prove it. This raid card actually runs at PCIe x 8 on PCIe VGA slot. As for boot time it 's just extra 5 sec so it's rather quick.