Ashton Mills reaches for his can'o'RAID.
With the recent move to integrate RAID functionality into onboard controllers, as revealed in the latest chipsets from NVIDIA and Intel, a standalone RAID capable SATA controller isn't anything special. But the four bay hot-swappable RAID chasis that comes with this one certainly is.
Aside from the four-port Adaptec 2410SA - Adaptec's flagship SATA based RAID controller - this kit comes with a specialised enclosure designed for the RAID at heart: four hot swappable clip-in drive carriers that slide into an internal chasis complete with 90mm fan for cooling paired with inbuilt temperature and fan failover alerts. Two Molex plugs are required to power the chasis which also comes with a specialised connector to hook up the drive LEDs to the 2410SA card - if you've ever wanted to see the individual drive accesses of your four drive RAID 0 array, now you can!
The chasis is designed to replace 5.25in drive bay housings in tower cases, and comes in both beige and black for the style concious. Installation is simple, and SATA ports at the back are clearly marked so you can hook up the right drive to the right port.
The controller itself has an excellent BIOS setup tool for creating and managing RAID arrays, which includes levels 0, 1, 5, 10 and volume spanning (JBOD). Windows management software is also provided, as is the ability to manage an array over the network. The card is also supported in Linux, with a bootable Linux CD supplied to allow management of an array should the system's OS go walkabout.
We tested the kit with two 7200rpm Maxtor Maxline III 250GB SATA drives on an nForce3 250 Athlon 64 system to see how the card performed. As expected, the two-drive RAID 0 array proffered a respectable performance increase, undoubtedly helped by the 2410SA'sonboard 64MB cache. In SiSoft Sandra 2004 the array scored a clean 78MB/s, compared to 47MB/s for a single drive, while in ATTO 2.1 it scored 72MB/s write with an impressive 97MB/s read.
Overall this is a speedy solution for creation and management of RAID magic, but it comes at a cost. For the price you can just as easily buy four SATA drives, connect themto your onboard contoller, and use software RAID for the same result. It wouldn't be as cool, of course, but it'd do the job just fine.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012