Delivers high-end RAID functionality coupled to integrated serialattached HDD technology capabilities, allowing the user to mix and match between high-performance, high-reliability SAS disks and cheaper SATA devices. Also, masses of expandability with bus throughput leaping by adopting PCI-E 8x means you won’t need to upgrade for a very long time.
When it comes to storage I/O operations, the general consensus at the moment is that a serial connection is the way to go. Far superior in both scalability and performance terms to older, parallel-architected standards, serial connectivity [we’re talking SATA, SAS (Serial Attached SCSI), even USB] has firmly taken the reins.
This Adaptec 5405 RAID controller highlights the improved flexibility of this I/O architecture as one of this respected high-end storage specialist’s new range of unified serial controllers, by providing integrated support for both the conventional SATA HDD as well as disks utilising the pricier SAS interface.
The choice of deploying huge, inexpensive SATA disks to create a monstrous, performanceoptimised and replicated data set, or an ultra high-speed but more reasonable-capacity SAS solution, is left up to you.
It looks like an unobtrusive enough add-in card at first, connecting via an eight-lane PCI-E slot with just the chunky, black heat sink on its face suggesting that some potent datahandling hardware lurks beneath. Once plugged in and powered up, however, it sheds its workmanlike looks with a discotheque of red LEDs flashing the insides of the machine you’ve installed the card into with crimson.
We first tested this Adaptec offering with a pair of 160GB SATA drives attached via the included fourport SATA connector. Running first as standalone drives yielded unimpressive results in the HDD section of our PCMark Vantage test suite: an overall score of 3,146 helped by a peak read speed (in the Windows Media Centre subsection) of 54MB/sec.
Striping across both drives for maximum performance using RAID 0 saw the PCMark result jump to a far more impressive 4,978, with the peak read speed very nearly doubling, at 97MB/sec. Switching to our pair of Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 SAS drives saw a single disc matching these results: 5,008 overall with an identical 97MB/sec peak.
What’s more, scanning through the detailed results shows that the lowest transfer rate is more than triple the lowest component with the SATA discs installed. Hooking up this pair of 74GB SAS Cheetahs in RAID 0 yielded phenomenal results on this Adaptec controller. PCMark overall result leaped to 9,114, and peak throughput jumps to a staggering 176MB/sec. What’s more, the more random-access test components, the most important tangible element of drive performance, now all but matched the peak, sequential speeds of the single SATA disc, with few results coming in at lower than 50MB/sec.
Apart from pure speed, however, the SAS technology has a few more tricks up its sleeve. After all, pure throughput gains are surely not enough to offset the stiff costs of these products. Just like conventional SCSI before it, the real strengths of the technology lie in boasting the highest levels of reliability possible, and a scalability that blasts the 16-device SCSI bus into the weeds, capable of supporting 256 SAS devices on a single channel. Sure, you’ll actually saturate the throughput bus with this many devices, but again with a theoretical maximum of 3GB/sec on the PCI-E 8x bus, this Adaptec unit’s performance will remain positively stellar, and way beyond the theoretical maximums of either SCSI (320MB/sec) or SATA (300MB/sec).
The Adaptec controller itself gives you the versatility to utilise both modern, serial-attached storage standards as well as all the RAID options that could possibly be needed, even in the most demanding of storage environments. What’s more, the on-board processor complete with 256MB of DDR2-based, dedicated cache takes a lot of the strain off the CPU when writing at peak throughput to the attached drives.
This is not so much of an issue these days with quad-core processors being the norm, but it could make all the difference in a heavily-utilised Web server responding to thousands of queries a second, freeing up CPU time to handle these transactions while the RAID controller makes sure that the relevant data is pulled from and stored to the disks efficiently.
For the moment then, SAS continues the SCSI tradition perfectly, offering excellent performance combined with rock-solid reliability and backed by an architecture exponentially more scalable than the more traditional SCSI interface can manage, at a price point that reflects these enterpriselevel abilities. But the Adaptec 5405 RAID controller does appear to be an ideal way to mix the benefits of both SAS with the affordability factor of the ubiquitous SATA format, while freeing your CPU from the dreary task of granular HDD management.
And it offers a world of hardware data reliability as well with a massive array of potential RAID configurations on offer. Pricey it may be, but if you run a mission-critical server that services thousands of users at once, all day long from a massive, directly connected database, it is in fact an invaluable addition delivering near limitless scalability, HDD tech flexibility, excellent throughput and hardwarebased data redundancy using whichever RAID setup suits your particular environment best. It even brightens the server up aesthetically with those flashing red LEDs.
When it comes to storage I/O operations, the general consensus at the moment is that a serial connection is the way to go. Far superior in both scalability and performance terms to older, parallel-architected standards, serial connectivity [we’re talking SATA, SAS (Serial Attached SCSI), even USB] has firmly taken the reins.
This Adaptec 5405 RAID controller highlights the improved flexibility of this I/O architecture as one of this respected high-end storage specialist’s new range of unified serial controllers, by providing integrated support for both the conventional SATA HDD as well as disks utilising the pricier SAS interface.
The choice of deploying huge, inexpensive SATA disks to create a monstrous, performanceoptimised and replicated data set, or an ultra high-speed but more reasonable-capacity SAS solution, is left up to you.
It looks like an unobtrusive enough add-in card at first, connecting via an eight-lane PCI-E slot with just the chunky, black heat sink on its face suggesting that some potent datahandling hardware lurks beneath. Once plugged in and powered up, however, it sheds its workmanlike looks with a discotheque of red LEDs flashing the insides of the machine you’ve installed the card into with crimson.
We first tested this Adaptec offering with a pair of 160GB SATA drives attached via the included fourport SATA connector. Running first as standalone drives yielded unimpressive results in the HDD section of our PCMark Vantage test suite: an overall score of 3,146 helped by a peak read speed (in the Windows Media Centre subsection) of 54MB/sec.
Striping across both drives for maximum performance using RAID 0 saw the PCMark result jump to a far more impressive 4,978, with the peak read speed very nearly doubling, at 97MB/sec. Switching to our pair of Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 SAS drives saw a single disc matching these results: 5,008 overall with an identical 97MB/sec peak.
What’s more, scanning through the detailed results shows that the lowest transfer rate is more than triple the lowest component with the SATA discs installed. Hooking up this pair of 74GB SAS Cheetahs in RAID 0 yielded phenomenal results on this Adaptec controller. PCMark overall result leaped to 9,114, and peak throughput jumps to a staggering 176MB/sec. What’s more, the more random-access test components, the most important tangible element of drive performance, now all but matched the peak, sequential speeds of the single SATA disc, with few results coming in at lower than 50MB/sec.
Apart from pure speed, however, the SAS technology has a few more tricks up its sleeve. After all, pure throughput gains are surely not enough to offset the stiff costs of these products. Just like conventional SCSI before it, the real strengths of the technology lie in boasting the highest levels of reliability possible, and a scalability that blasts the 16-device SCSI bus into the weeds, capable of supporting 256 SAS devices on a single channel. Sure, you’ll actually saturate the throughput bus with this many devices, but again with a theoretical maximum of 3GB/sec on the PCI-E 8x bus, this Adaptec unit’s performance will remain positively stellar, and way beyond the theoretical maximums of either SCSI (320MB/sec) or SATA (300MB/sec).
The Adaptec controller itself gives you the versatility to utilise both modern, serial-attached storage standards as well as all the RAID options that could possibly be needed, even in the most demanding of storage environments. What’s more, the on-board processor complete with 256MB of DDR2-based, dedicated cache takes a lot of the strain off the CPU when writing at peak throughput to the attached drives.
This is not so much of an issue these days with quad-core processors being the norm, but it could make all the difference in a heavily-utilised Web server responding to thousands of queries a second, freeing up CPU time to handle these transactions while the RAID controller makes sure that the relevant data is pulled from and stored to the disks efficiently.
For the moment then, SAS continues the SCSI tradition perfectly, offering excellent performance combined with rock-solid reliability and backed by an architecture exponentially more scalable than the more traditional SCSI interface can manage, at a price point that reflects these enterpriselevel abilities. But the Adaptec 5405 RAID controller does appear to be an ideal way to mix the benefits of both SAS with the affordability factor of the ubiquitous SATA format, while freeing your CPU from the dreary task of granular HDD management.
And it offers a world of hardware data reliability as well with a massive array of potential RAID configurations on offer. Pricey it may be, but if you run a mission-critical server that services thousands of users at once, all day long from a massive, directly connected database, it is in fact an invaluable addition delivering near limitless scalability, HDD tech flexibility, excellent throughput and hardwarebased data redundancy using whichever RAID setup suits your particular environment best. It even brightens the server up aesthetically with those flashing red LEDs.
