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A commonly asked question is what makes up a good RAID controller. There are many purveyors of RAID cards out there that will sell a FakeRAID solution supporting RAID 5 or RAID 6 for a premium. Read the full story

I have been using Adaptec products for over a decade, and have generally been a fan (with a few exceptions over the years). My first Windows Home Server was based upon an Adaptec 31605 RAID controller.  Today, PMC-Sierra acquired Adaptec’s channel storage business, including their RAID business for $34m USD in cash.

This is probably a sign of things to come in the storage space. I am also guessing some larger players (Dell and HP) will be interested in picking up a few smaller storage vendors in the coming year.

Hopefully PMC-Sierra will have the resources to make some cool controllers in the future. I hope PMC-Sierra continues Adaptec’s MaxIQ SSD caching and expands it to work very well with commodity SSDs.

In the event that you missed it: PMC-Sierra, Inc. Investor Relations – Corporate & Product News Release on Adaptec Business Acquisition

Although more will follow, here’s a quick glimpse of what a cheap, but quality hardware raid solution can do with cheap, and large SATA drives in Raid 5. Keep in mind that the Perc 5/i uses the old IOP333 CPU clocked at 500MHz. Many current 3 series Adaptec products, for example, utilize the IOP333 at 800MHz. Also, one should note that there are reports that the IOP348 has some issues with SATA drives making the below representative of very inexpensive ($1000) raid arrays with huge capacities.

Raid 0 with 8 Seagate 7200.11 1.5TB drives with a Dell Perc 5/i 1MB stripe

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