I think so yes, it doesn't stray too far from the original story but adds a lot on top of it and adds a lot of post game mechanics that I haven't encountered yet. I had never played Crystal before (but I did play Silver and I think Crystal's story is 90% same?) and it seems really polished (haha). It just feels like a much more modern game than what I remember Silver being.
I'm looking for a similar sort of ROM hack for Emerald since I never played gen 3 and later. I think I'll go for Modern Emerald but I'd love to hear other suggestions.
You can often flash these raid cards into IT mode to disable raid and so that they just pass through the raw disks. That way you can hook up either SAS or SATA drives and run them with software raid of your choosing, like ZFS. SATA is probably the safer bet since you will be able to use them in a future build without issues, but there's no issue with SAS.
If you can't flash this raid card to IT mode you can buy a cheap LSI 92xx card. They are quite common and cheap, and easy to flash to IT mode.