Conclusion

Recalling the impression ASR-3405 made on us back in the days, we should confess that the fifth series from Adaptec is definitely better. The combination of a high-performance processor and optimized firmware makes the ASR-5805 completely different from its predecessor. This controller delivers superb performance with every array type under server loads, can choose the disk of a mirror that takes less time to access data, and can also read from both disks of a mirror simultaneously.

It is also very good with RAID5 and RAID6 arrays which are difficult to write good firmware for. Optimizations are present for degraded arrays, too. The speed of sequential reading is far from the theoretical one, but better than what the competitor products we have tested so far can offer.

On the downside is the terribly low performance of some arrays at sequential writing. The controller is especially poor at writing large files, so Adaptec still has something to improve.