Recommend a Hardware PCI-E 4+Port RAID5 Controller!

Unfortunately there doesnt seem to be any Perc5/i available and I'm not really willing to wait around for one, I'm tempted by the Adaptec AAR-2410SA, but also being lured to the speed of the Highpoint RocketRaid RR3510LF, decisions decisions!
 
How would the Adaptec AAR-2410SA compare to the ICH9R with a couple of drives in RAID0?
 
Burned_Alive said:
Unfortunately there doesnt seem to be any Perc5/i available and I'm not really willing to wait around for one, I'm tempted by the Adaptec AAR-2410SA, but also being lured to the speed of the Highpoint RocketRaid RR3510LF, decisions decisions!
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I went for one of these, got it for £26 delivered :) I'm going to set it up tonight so will report back on how it compares to onboard RAID.

Cheers, Nick
 
Cob said:
Any news :)
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I bought the 6 port version, Adaptec AAR-2610SA (which appears to be PCI-X, but works fine in PCI), tested it yesterday in my Gigabyte X38 DQ6, which picked it up straight away, when I got into Vista, the OS tried to install driver, but there was none within the OS to install (which according to the Adaptec website the driver is supposed to be in box), so I found the "Windows Server 2008 x64" drivers (also mentioned in above post) which installed and worked with Vista Business 64 bit...I only attached the 1 HDD but did work, and I was able to get into all the BIOS options via ctrl + A to set different parameters.

Manual can be found Here

More drivers can be found Here

Apparently Windows 2003 Server driver can be used for XP, but there does appear to be XP drivers available.
 
you'd be better off trying to source a Perc 5/i imo, unless you go true hardware i don't see the point in mickey mouse cards unless you just need extra ports.
 
wow seems it is, i wonder if the chip actually does any parity calcs though? i'd be surprised tbh.

make sure to post some benches in raid 5...interesting for sure.

if you can't find them here then look to *bay in the states for perc 5/i cards there's loads of them and they are powerful for the price, i get over 300MB/s read/writes with my setup (real figures not just benches).....1/4 the price of a RR3510 and 8 ports versus 4 plus you can use SAS drives on the Perc as well.
 
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The adaptec card does have a hardware XOR processor, and are reasonably fast, though are designed for PCI-X as mentioned above. I have one of the 21610SA cards, which is exactly the same as the 2610sa, except it has 16 ports instead of 6. There are a couple of problems with these cards though, which I would consider suffiecient to advise against using them, firstly they are tied to a 2 TB array size limit, no good for hte current 750 Gb or 1 TB drives. They are also SATA 150, and mine does not like Samsung drives at all, which is a pity as the Samsung drives are considerably cheaper then the competition currently.

So if you have opted for a 2610SA I would be interested to hear how your array building goes. By the way, Vista does have the driver built in for all of these cards, but to use the 2610sa, which are Dell branded cards built by Adaptec, you have to tell Vista that it is a Adaptec 2410, 2810 or 21610. The Adaptec driver is better however, and gives ability to turn cache on off etc.
 
Hi there

Yes, even using a 64 bit OS, you create the RAID array in the cards bios, before getting to the OS, and it will not let you select drives that create more than 2 TB. Adaptecs 'workaround' is to create a number of 'hardware' arrays, then stripe them together in the OS. This does work, however it is very wasteful if you are using RAID 5 as you drop one drive per array. In the end I use the card with one array per drive, then software RAID 5 them via Windows Server.

This works fine, and I get about 50 Mb/sec write speeds consistently, which is fine for my purpose. Again though the Adaptec card really does not like the Samsung drives, and will randomly 'drop' them on reboot. My other drives are Seagate, not WD as I had previously thought, but they detect every time without fail. Again this is not the end of the world, but it is a pain. Have to remember to set 'auto updates' to never, and remember never to reboot, but to shutdown, then restart. Apart from this the Adaptec card rocks!! you wanna buy it?
 
Pandobear said:
Hi there
.......you wanna buy it?
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Actually, I have already bought one, to good a bargain to miss I thought £34 + del....got it a few days ago, fitted it with just 1 HDD connected to see if it works....

to use the 2610sa, which are Dell branded cards built by Adaptec, you have to tell Vista that it is a Adaptec 2410, 2810 or 21610
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How do you "tell" Vista (64bit) that the Adaptec 2610SA card is an Adaptec 2410, 2810 or 21610..?

When I tried to install the drivers using Vista 64 bit, it said that the OS could not locate it, obviously this was because I didn't "tell" it that the 2610SA was an Adaptec 2410, 2810 or 21610...but I found This driver worked with Vista 64 bit...
 
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