ADAPTEC 1430SA vs HIGHPOINT ROCKETRAID 2310 [Archivio]

Ywes

17-11-2009, 15:14

niente da suggerirmi ragazzi?:)

Dai un occhiata sotto e trai tu le tue dovute conclusioni. Spero di esserti stato utile in qualche modo. Ciao!

----------------------------------------------------

3WARE

9650/9660 family - These cards are based on SATA 1 technology, as a result they may not even exceed 150MB per channel. The 4 channel and 8 channel flavours are roughly priced along with the competition.

9690 family - These cards stand out right away as having the PCI-E bandwidth, the ports, and 512MB of cache. There's nothing in the same bracket as these for price/cache.

Both families of cards use RISC on board i/o processors. 3ware goes no specifications for them, and a little investigation turns out the reason. They cannot compete with the processors everybody else is using, the Intel ones. This thread at Xtreme Systems is a good read for anyone thinking these cards might be a good buy. Essentially the processor on the 9690 family cannot handle 250MB/sec of speed. This speed will be met by 2 OCZ SSD drives in RAID0. Other cheaper cards can handle higher bandwidths. As a result I cannot see any reason to consider these cards.

ADAPTEC

Adaptec nomenclature.
Family name, Internal Ports, External Ports, Interface Type
E.g. Family 1. 4 internal ports, 0 external ports, SAS interface is 1405
Family 3, 12 internal ports, 0 external ports, SAS interface is 31205

1 family (1405, 1430SA). These are 'hybrid' RAID cards and do not contain a processor on board to handle RAID operations. Theoretically they offload this to the processor, and theoretically this should cause a small hit to CPU performance, while there is no reason to expect degraded bandwidth. However nobody is of the opinion these will actually do the job. There is only one anecdote of this I am aware of, which came from a buyer from overclockers.co.uk. He stated the 1430SA did not perform well with SSDs in his test, coming out worse than motherboard performance. I personally bought a 1430SA before I had completed all this research, as I saw it at less than 1/2 price. I will test it and report back, however I do not expect the 1430SA to be able to handle OCZ SSD RAID0. The 1405 is a SAS card, while the 1430SA is a 4 port SATA card.

2 family (2405) This is the first Adaptec proper hardware RAID card in their line up. The processor is reputedly an Intel IOP348 @ 800mhz. According to available information this processor should have enough bandwidth to handle 4x OCZ SSD RAID0. It has been tested with good results by Wendy with a 2xRAID0 array.

3 family (3405, 3805, 31205, 31605)

These cards use Intel IOP333 processors. All rated at 800mhz with the exception of the 3405 which has a 500mhz processor. As you can see from the nomenclature the family has a 4, 8, 12 and 16 port model. The specs do not remain the same as the ports increases. Going from 4 ports to 8 ports buys you a faster processor. There appear to be 2 3805 models, one with 128MB cache and one with 256MB cache. Going from the 3805 up to the 31205 or 31605 simply buys extra ports, the maximum cache on this family is 256MB. This leaves 3 realistic choices for us SAS users. It seems that the apparent drop in specs from the 2405 to the 3405 is because the 2405 only supports 'basic' RAID types (0,1,10) while the 3405 is full featured.

3405 IOP333@500 128MB cache
3805 IOP333@800 128MB cache
3805 IOP333@800 256MB cache

I am not aware of any user experience with this family of cards. However it's a step up from the tried and tested 2 family, and a step down from the tried and tested 5 family. The processor on the 3405 does however seem a little weaker than the 2405, anyone considering this model should investigate further.

5 family (5405, 5445, 5805, 51205, 51605, 52405)

A simpler family to understand than the 3 family. 4,8,12,16,24 ports. Same processor on all of them - Intel IOP348@1200. 256MB cache on the 5405, 512MB on the others. Moving from a 5805 up gives no benefit other than ports.

Adaptec cards of note summary

2405 IOP348@800 128MB cache $195
3405 IOP333@500 128MB cache $285
3805 IOP333@800 256MB cache $470
5405 IOP348@1200 256MB cache $335
5805 IOP348@1200 512MB cache $500

ARECA

Arecas nomenclature is considerably more difficult to comprehend than Adaptec's simple one.

SATA2 12 family (1231ML, 1261ML, 1280, 1280ML)

These cards are expensive in comparison to the competition with comparable cache and the same processor. Of note is the 1280 and 1280ML which have replaceable memory modules with a maximum capacity of 1GB. These cards however come in at $1000 which I would imagine would rule them out of anyone's consideration. The 1231 has been tested and as per Areca's stats caps shy of a hefty 800MB/sec. This is what 4 OCZ drives in RAID0 could be expected to perform at best, however the new Vertex drives may test this limit. The processor on the 1231 is an IOP341@800. Sadly I cannot find the tested card available on retail. The 1231ML has a lower spec than the 1231.

SAS 12 family (1212, 1222)

A 4 port and an 8 port card with an IOP348@800 and 256MB cache. I suspect these are the only two members of the 12 family for consideration.

SAS 16 family (1680, 1680LP, 1680x, 1680i, 1680ix-8, 1680ix-12, 1680ix-16, 1680ix-24)

These cards are expensive. They come with an IOP348@800 or 1200 and either 256MB or 512MB of cache. Some of the 1200mhz cards have upgradable RAM making them noteworthy.

Areca cards of note summary

ARC-1212 IOP348@800 256MB cache $350
ARC-1222 IOP348@800 256MB cache $370
ARC-1680 IOP348@1200 256MB(up to 2GB) cache $621
ARC-1680ix-8 IOP348@1200 512MB cache $650
ARC-1680ix-12 IOP348@1200 512MB(up to 4GB) cache $760

ATTO

R30F, R348 These cards do not seem to be aimed at the same market segment as the rest of the cards in my research. I cannot find much information on the processor, and the cache doesn't seem to be high. The cost is though! For all I know the high price could handle serious bandwidth, so perhaps these cards are worth investigating for anyone intending to run 8x Vertex in RAID0, which possibly could push even the beefiest of the Intel IOP based cards.

In short I know almost nothing about ATTO cards.

Highpoint

RocketRaid 2 SATA family (2310, 2320) RocketRaid 2 SAS family (2340, 2640x4, 2642, 2680)

These cards do not appear to have an onboard processor. See the notes on the Adaptec 1 family above.

RocketRaid 3 family, 4 family (3320, 3510, 3520, 3530, 3540, 4320) - A nice wide range of cards at various pricepoints. The 3320 alone has SATA controllers as opposed to the rest which have SAS, and an Intel IOP333@800. The rest of the 3 family all have Intel IOP341@800 and 4, 8 12 or 16 ports. The 3320 and 3520 would appear to have almost identical stats, and price the two differences being the interface type and the Intel processor model number. I wish I knew more about the different IOP processors and their relative performance. Eva2000 has great results with a RocketRaid 3520.

Highpoint cards of note summary
3510 IOP341@800mhz, 256MB cache $335
3520 IOP341@800mhz, 256MB cache $405
3320 IOP333@800mhz, 256MB cache $410

LSI Nothing to do with the old Shamen song

No tests available on any LSI cards, sadly.

82 series (8204ELP, 8208ELP) - I believe these to be Hybrid RAID cards. The LSI website alludes to this as well.

84 series (84016E) - This card is the only LSI card to openly come with an Intel IOP chip. An IOP333@500mhz with 256MB of cache. The processor might not have the bandwidth to handle 4xOCZ V2 in RAID0. Clearly more investigation is required before these cards can be discounted. Until that happens though these cards are not tried and tested and they may not have the bandwidth to cope.

87 series (various) These cards are specified as having an SAS1078@500. I have no idea what this is. It could be an Intel chip, or it might not be. LSI as I understand are the largest manufacturer, and other companies rebrand or have their cards produced by LSI. IBM, Supermicro for example, look for mentions of MegaRAID. The cache on these cards is 128MB across the board. The lowest price for this series is $271. If price is anything to go on then the processor should be able to handle the bandwidth - but that is a wild stab in the dark.

88 series (8880EM2, 8888ELP) Same chip as the 87 series, but with 512MB and 256MB of cache respectively.

Promise

Nomenclature - Ports, Interface (3 for SATA, 6 for SAS), Unknown (5 in all cards I look at), unknown (0 in all but 1 card I look at)
E.g. EX4350 is a 4 port SATA card.
EX16650 is a 16 port SAS card.

EX4350 by it's specs should come out in price as a nice budget card. 64MB of cache and an Intel IOP333@500. However it's $300.

STEX8650 is the only card to be reasonably competitive with Highpoint, Areca and Adaptec. The card has an IOP348@800 with 256Mb of cache and comes out at $400

Promise cards may be worth more of a look if their cards in your country are more competitively priced than the other brands. The specifications on their cards have a good scale of processor speeds and cache, however the prices I was able to find made them uncompetitive.

Supermicro

Bargains galore here. These cards appear to be made (at least most of them) by LSI. Availability is not good, but they can be found. Support looks to be minimal at best - but that's just a judgement from their typical SE-Asian hardware website.

Picking what appears to be the best bargain of the bunch the AOC-USAS-S4iR has an IOP348@unknown speed (lowest possible is 667 unless they are running under spec) and 256MB of cache coming in at a bargain $195. Since no other card I've seen runs at 667 if I was forced to guess I'd say it runs at 800. This makes the card comparable to an Adaptec 3405 at $100 less. Personally without a great deal more information I would not touch these cards with a barge pole, and I would strongly recommend anyone thoroughly investigates these cards before purchase. Ideally an agreement with a retailer to be able to return the card if it's not suitable. The only reason I'm including the cards is because potentially they could be fantastic value for money at the lower end. If these cards turn out to be simply rebranded LSI cards and can receive firmware updates and driver updates as LSI cards can then there could be real value here. Of course there's little information available on LSI cards too!

Sadly the cards do not appear to scale. It is possible that there's 667mhz right up to 1200mhz cards in there but SuperMicro do not provide much information.

The specifications on the cards (cards and processors) can be matched against LSI cards $100 more expensive, if a leap of faith is taken on the processor speed.

Sonnet

Sonnet appears to be an Apple Macintosh specialist company, although they do list Windows/Linux compatibility on some products. Despite a large range of cards, none are Hardware RAID.