Adaptec for years have been producing high-end controller cards to cater for server and workstation environments. Adaptec previously focused their efforts towards higher-cost interface types, such as SCSI and RAID. With the recent addition of SATA technology businesses and even home consumers are able to enjoy higher speed transfer rates at a fraction of the cost. Whilst SATA is not yet considered an ideal technology for stable server environments it is steadily becoming common in both home-user and workstation environments.

With the addition of Western Digital’s Raptor SATA drive SATA owners are able to reach speeds of up to 10,000RPM and 1.5 Gbps (150 MB/sec) on each drive within a disk drive array. Whilst the SATA interface may still fall behind SCSI in terms of performance and stability it is still a significant step up from the traditional IDE interface technology. SATA technology uses smaller cables, which means its better for expandability reasons and air cooling efficiency. This is particularly useful for servers and workstations but, of course with today’s modern graphics cards air cooling is also main priority for home consumers. The most promising feature of Serial ATA is that it works along side IDE and SCSI interfaces, including all major operating systems, providing true compatibility and ease-of-use.

Features and Specifications

The Adaptec SATA 2410SA RAID controller comes equipped with 4 Serial-ATA ports and supports RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD configurations. Along with its onboard Intel 80302 microprocessor the card comes with 64 MB’s of fixed ECC SDRAM cache memory, providing true performance and enhanced stability. Along with several configuration benefits, SATA technology improves data transmission through a point-to-point topology, which eliminates bus sharing, thereby delivering a full 1.5Gb/s bandwidth to each drive. The cards 48-bit LBA (Logical Block Addressing) enables support for larger drives. Logical Block addressing is a method used with SCSI, IDI and SATA drives to translate the cylinder, head and sector specifications of the drive into addresses that can be used by an enhanced BIOS. LBA is used with drives that are larger than 528MB’s. Because all modern drives are built bigger than 528MB’s LBA technology comes standard with all drives. The Adaptec 2410SA supports SATA 2 features including enclosure management and backplanes.

Key Differentiators

• Optimized Disk Utilization
• RAID Level Migration
• Online capacity expansion
• Background initialization (for immediate RAID availability)
• Enclosure Management ready
• Hot-swap disk drive support for easy replacement
• Hot-spare disk support with automatic rebuild
• Supports bootable arrays

Data Transfer Rate
Up to 1.5 Gbits/sec

Internal Connectors
Four Serial ATA ports

Bus Type
64-bit/66MHz PCI

System Requirements
Available PCI slot meeting PCI 2.2 specification

RAID Levels
64 MByte (onboard)

Key RAID Features

• Optimized disk utilization
• Online RAID Level Migration
• Online capacity expansion
• Immediate RAID availability (background initialization)
• S.M.A.R.T. support

Supported Operating Systems
Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server
Microsoft Windows 2000 Server
Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Microsoft Windows Server 2003
RedHat Linux 7.3
RedHat Linux 8.0
SuSE Linux 8.0
SuSE Linux 8.1
SCO UnixWare 7.11
Caldera Open Unix 8

Conclusion

The Adaptec SATA 2410SA RAID controller card is the ideal controller card for servers and workstations. The high price-tag will undoubtedly deter home consumers from buying this product and this is where Adaptec’s more affordable SATA range comes in. Like so many home consumers, especially those with high-speed net connections, the problem of managing vast amounts of data is on the increase. Those home users who can afford to have turned to components, which are primarily aimed at server environments, to manage data within their systems. If you are a home user and you can afford the price tag then it would be well worth considering the upgrade. Because of its performance and expandability features we are going to award the Adaptec SATA 2410SA Raid controller with a 5 star rating.