X-bit labs

Adaptec Goes Serial ATA RAID Controllers.

Category: Storage

by Anton Shilov

[ 01/25/2004 | 05:26 AM ]

Serial ATA-150 has made it quite big in the recent 1.5 years on the market of personal computers. However, servers, workstations and certain other mission critical applications still utilise SCSI hard disk drives. Meanwhile Serial Attached SCSI – a substitute for traditional SCSI – is not here, Adaptec – a company known for its advanced storage controllers – unveils its professional RAID technology for Serial ATA-150 HDDs.

Adaptec’s Serial ATA RAID solution couples Adaptec HostRAID with high-throughput 4- and 8-port Serial ATA ASIC technology from Marvell Semiconductor. HostRAID provides the same mirroring and striping capabilities embedded in Adaptec’s Ultra320 SCSI controllers. To simplify storage management and reduce related costs, the solution can be managed under the same management software used for Adaptec’s SCSI, Serial ATA and upcoming Serial Attached SCSI solutions.

In general, Adaptec’s Serial ATA RAID provides up to 150MB/s per port throughput, RAID levels 0, 1 and 10, the ability to deploy up to 4 or 8 Serial ATA-150 disk drives for greater storage capacity.

Systems integrating next-generation mainboards from ASUSTeK, Gigabyte Technology, Supermicro and TYAN mainboards powered by the Adaptec solution will combine these capabilities with the seamless migration path to Adaptec’s external storage arrays.

The concern about Serial ATA-150 HDDs in mission critical applications nowadays is rather limited availability of high-speed, high-quality hard disk drives with Serial ATA-150 interface. In fact, there is only Western Digital, who supplies its Raptor series with 10 000rpm motors positioning them for servers and workstations. Other makers of storage solutions yet have to announce Serial ATA-150 products for such kind of applications.