Adaptec RAID 3805 8-port SATA and SAS Controller Review

[Apoptosis]

The Adaptec RAID 3805 is an 8-port controller that supports SATA and SAS drives and next-generation PCIe connectivity. It features Adaptec RAID Code (ARC) with RAID levels 0, 1, 1E, 5, 5EE, 6, 10, 50, 60, JBOD and more! Read on to see how this MD2 low-profile RAID card does as we test it with 8 Western Digital Raptor hard drives in 11 RAID configurations on Linux!

Raid10 can be a good compromise between raid5 and raid0 in terms of size. This configuration also allows you to have 1 and sometimes two drives fail and still maintain your volume. If you are like me and use your PC as a DVR, I have no real need for the extra speed. Raid5 is my choice because it gives me the most hard drive space while giving me at least one drive failure. If a drive does fail getting a next day air replacement from newegg will suffice. The odds that another drive will fail in those 24 hours are extremely low. If I want to be even more cautious, I can keep a hot spare in the array that could be merged into the array automatically.

Article Title: Adaptec RAID 3805 8-port SATA and SAS Controller Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/508/1/

[bubba]

Nice read. I'd think you would have to be real serious about data storage to have one of these in your home setup. Deep pockets wouldn't hurt either

If there was a part two to this review, I would likely include tests of 7200rpm SATA drives which are bigger and cheaper.

Bet you could build one nice setup with 7200rpm SATA drives, but would it be worth it?

[Sovereign]

Cool. Now, if only I had a PCI-E ribbon extender... What I mean is something that extends the PCI-E slot out and is flexible. That's the only way to get any more expansion cards in my case due to dual 7900GTXs and an X-Fi consuming all available space.

[atlr]

suggestion: add single drive to all tests for a performanance comparison with RAID

[DX]

Damn nice review. I'm glad to see some thing like this.

[dlang]

in a configuration test like this, especially when running Linux, it would be good to have a few datapoints in the results showing how this card compares with the software option (you may also need to note the CPU utilization during the tests)

after all, is $500 really buying anything?

just one test with each raid type would be enough