Inexpensive Adaptec Hardware Raid Card!

[Jesse]

Hi Folks,

If you are looking to get into RAID but the cost of a true hardware controller card is prohibitive check out this thread at the AccessHA forums: http://www.accessha.com/forums/proje...ia-server.html. The card is made by adaptec for dell and is only available as an "oem" piece. I picked one up new on ebay last week for $175 shipped. The same seller has more here:http://cgi.ebay.com/Adaptec-2610SA-6...QQcmdZViewItem This auction will be up soon but he seems to have a few and just keeps listing them.

It is only a six port card but with 300 and 400 gb hdd's getting reasonable this could be a very cost effective raid solution for those who do not need a massive array.

Just thought I would pass it along.

Jesse

[Enormous]

Great link! Thanks for the info.

[ke6guj]

I use the 2810SA and like it a lot, so I would assume that the 2610SA would be pretty much the same, just 2 less ports. I was looking at doing the 2610SA but found a good deal on the 2810SA and jumped on it for the 2 extra ports.

Just make sure that you can find good support for the drivers, software, and firmware. At one time, I thought that adaptec had a support page for the 2610SA but when I went ot go look for it right now, I couldn't find it. And Dell's site can be frustrating to navigate.

[Jesse]

Hi,

Just make sure that you can find good support for the drivers, software, and firmware. At one time, I thought that adaptec had a support page for the 2610SA but when I went ot go look for it right now, I couldn't find it. And Dell's site can be frustrating to navigate

Quite right. Especially about Dell's site.

Here is what I came up with:
http://search.dell.com/results.aspx?...t=all&cs=&c=us

http://search.dell.com/results.aspx?...t=all&cs=&c=us

Jesse

[michelkenny]

So is this a hardware raid card, ie. for a RAID 5 array the card will do all the work? I've been looking for a decent RAID 5 card that won't slow down to a crawl... if this is the case then I may grab 2!

[Enormous]

To those who are running one of these cards:
Are you running it in a motherboard equipped with PCI-X? (NOT the same as PCI-Express!) If you are just running it in a normal PCI slot, does the performance still seem acceptable? I'm seriously considering picking one of these up now that NASLite supports hardware raid cards.

[ke6guj]

I'm running my 2810SA on a ASUS K8N-E deluxe board. And it only has PCI slots

IT works fine. However, if I am copy over a couple movie files over the gigabit network, it'll usually cause the UI to become slow to respond to the remote. It'll sometimes cause some video pauses but the audio usually plays fine. Any current recordings seem to record fine though. Once the copying is over, it goes back to normal.

[Enormous]

What CPU are you using? I'm thinking about trying to run a 2610SA with a Gigabit card, all with a PII 333... It'll just be a dedicated NAS, with the SageTV service on another machine. Think I'll run into performance issues?

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by Enormous

What CPU are you using? I'm thinking about trying to run a 2610SA with a Gigabit card, all with a PII 333... It'll just be a dedicated NAS, with the SageTV service on another machine. Think I'll run into performance issues?

It's a Sempron 3100+. Probably won't have any problems unless you try to slam it with a ton of stuff at the same time. Even then, the writes seemed to have preference over the reads, and that was fine for me. Now, my raid is in my server, which is directly connected to my TV, so YMMV. If you were writing 5 sage streams into the NAS, and then tried o copy over a DVD-rip at the same time from a different computer, you may saturate the lan and bus, and then, who has priority?

[bruce_walter]

I have one of these cards (2610SA) in a bona-fide Dell PowerEdge 1800. The only disappointging thing I've found so far is that the card, either do to the firmware or architecture, appears to be limited to 2.4TB of total storage. I have (6) 400GB drives in it and am unable to get the last gasp of space out of them. If you plan on using 500GB drives with the 6-channel card, make sure you check with Dell/Adaptec that the card can support them.

- Bruce

[DocDrydenn]

OK, I read this post and decided to do a little research on these cards. Don't take this post as a flame of these cards, I simply want to express my opinions concerning what I have found out about these Hardware Raid Controllers.

First off, I had a really hard time finding information about these cards. Google choked, so to speak.

The little data I did find out about them wasn't all that great.

1. These are 64bit/66MHz (32bit/33MHz compatible). This could cause problems with some people's systems.

2. The XOR chips on these cards are over 5 years old. They cannot compete with todays cards. In the few benchmarks I saw, these were performing very slow for any type of RAID setup. The benchmarks also seemed to indicate that the CPU usage during reads and writes was higher than todays true hardware raid controllers.

3. Driver support seemed limited. Win2k3, Win2k, and a few linux OS's. (Not sure how well these will work on XP. I believe you could use the Win2K drivers in XP?)

At this point I gave up the search on these cards.

I have been using hardware raid controllers for some time now. Also, I will confess that I did not start with the 3ware card listed in my sig. I believe they were RAIDCore 8 port cards. (Non Broadcom) I bought these on e-bay before I did my homework.
I somehow managed to get them installed and working and had a large portion of my movies stored on the array only to find corruption occurring and a complete failure of the array. I decide to research these cards and came to find almost the exact same info as the cards mentioned above.

Needless to say, it only took me losing almost half of my collection to decide I would not "skimp" on my RAID Controllers. The cheap cost of the cards compared to the data loss (my time ripping the movies) was not worth it.

Let me stress this point: If you need reliable data storage in a RAID config, don't buy cheap controllers.

BTW, I found my 3ware 8506-8 RAID Controller on e-bay for about the same price these other cards are going for. Invest the extra $25-$30 and get peace of mind in knowing your data is safe.

Just my .02

[Enormous]

ke6guj and Bruce: Thank you both for the hands-on information. The read/write slowdown, and storage limit are great things to know before-hand.

Doc: Thank you also for your input. It's the great advice from all of you that makes this a wonderful place to come for help! You've convinced me to do more research myself, to make sure that I find the right card. The whole reason I'm looking to do a RAID-5 array is to avoid data loss, and if I'm going to spend all of this money, I may as well do it right!

Thanks again all.

[bruce_walter]

Doc,

Yah, don't get me wrong. I wouldn't have bought this card as just a card. The fact that it came essentially free with the server was the kicker for me. That and the server has the 64/66 pci slot to make it a bit faster

My dell pricing got me a PowerEdge 1800 dual processor Xeon 3.6 with 2gb of ram and the 6-port raid card and a 19" LCD monitor for $1300. That didn't include the 6 400gb drives, just a single SATA 120 which went into my workstation. All in all a decent deal for when I bought it. I had to force XP onto the box as only 2k3 was supported by dell, but it's been happily serving files, running showanalyzer and movietimes updates.

- Bruce