Adaptec adds low-end SAS/SATA boards
Goes RAIDing with smaller ROCs.
By Bryan Betts | Techworld | Published: 15:48, 14 May 2008
Adaptec has introduced two entry-level Unified Serial RAID controllers based on the dual-core silicon that it debuted earlier this year in its high-end Series 5 controllers.
Priced from £115, the new Series 2 controllers are low-profile PCIe x8 cards, and enable users to attach up to 128 SAS and SATA devices, including disk drives and arrays, tape drives, and SAS expanders. They support RAID levels 0, 1 and 10, and are plug & play-compatible with the latest Linux systems as well as Windows, according to Adaptec.
The company said that the cards feature a scaled-down version of its hardware RAID-on-Chip (ROC) technology, running at 800MHz. It added that hardware RAID should provide better performance than software RAID, as well as being less operating system-dependent and less vulnerable to malware.
"Customers who have specific storage needs, such as increased RAID performance for disk drives or tape backup, or who are working with applications based on Linux, will find our Series 2 controllers exceed those needs," claimed Suresh Panikar, Adaptec's world-wide marketing director.
The Series 2 boards are the £115 RAID 2405 with four 3Gbit/s internal ports and the £130 RAID 2045 with four 3Gbit/s external ports. Both controllers feature 128MB of DDR2 cache, Panikar said.
