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LSI has been fairly dominant in the 6.0gbps HBA/ RAID 0/1/10 market for quite a while now. Early market entry, low cost cards, and a myriad of OEM wins have made the SAS 2008/ SAS 2108 architectures the de-facto standard for use with software RAID or as RAID 0/1/10 devices. Adaptec paper launched their 6 series controllers which support the normal high-end features such as RAID 60 and flash backed write cache. Now Adaptec, following the PMC-Sierra acquisition, has moved to the lower end of the market previously occupied by cards such as the Adaptec 1045 with the new 6E series of controllers. The cards come in two flavors, the four port 6405E and the eight port 6805E. Read the full story

This week saw research on the sub-$10,000 USD NAS market almost doubling in size from 2009 to 2010. Hitachi announces a cloud storage system with 3GB of free storage. Adaptec’s 6-series RAID controllers get a design win.

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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