ServeTheHome – Intel Xeon AMD Opteron RAID Controller Reviews

As high-performance hard drives move to the 2.5” form factor, a form factor that has been common in the SSD and notebook space, mounting these drives in traditional cases can be somewhat difficult. Purchasing 2.5” to 3.5” adapters allow system builders to mount a single drive to a space meant for a 3.5” drive, but that can be a serious waste of space.

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Needing a few more drives in the Windows Home Server, I opted for an “ICY DOCK MB453IPF-B 3 in 2 SATA/SAS Backplane Module – Retail” This unit allows for three 3.5″ drives to be installed into a case with two open 5.25″ bays. What should be noted, as with most drive cages, is that consumer level cases often have metal tabs in the drive bays to guide and hold large optical drives in-line. These tabs sometimes require that they are bent back to be flush with the plane of the vertical drive walls when installing multi-bay multi-drive enclosures. On the Norco 4U case, which is designed for these types of multi-bay enclosures, the unit slid in easily. Depending on the case, one may need to screw or use other attachment methods to secure the enclosure to the case.

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Just to check some additional 15k rpm SAS numbers, I used three Seagate Cheetah 15k.5 300GB drives in Raid 5 to see what the numbers would look like. The drives are 3.5″ form factor units so they run quite a bit warmer than the 15k.1 2.5″ Savvios that are also in this machine. First the chart:

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Did some testing this weekend with the new Adaptec 5805. Since I wanted to see what this card could do, I decided to try it with some cheap Seagate Savvio 15k.1 36.7GB SAS drives. Overall performance is fine, however there was a consistently interesting note in ATTO’s benchmark at 64k. I tried every stripe size imaginable, and there was a distinct fall-off every time in read speeds. I also tried the newest firmware, same result. Truly odd indeed.

8x Seagate Savvio 15k Raid 5 Adaptec 5805

Notice the dip in read performance at 64k. This seems to be very strange and did not go away with three different firmware versions.
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