Adaptec has been really quiet of late, falling behind LSI in just about every turn and milestone. With the latest silicon, they leaped way ahead of LSI.
You might recall LSI has been showing off 12Gbps SAS chips for a while, with eight port silicon up and running. That is fine and dandy, but Adaptec just reset the bar with 24 ports of 12Gbps SAS standard on all their cards. With only eight, LSI looks a little anemic.
24 ports on a low profile card
As you can see, the new Adaptec SAS controllers and RAID cards come in both standard and low profile variants. They can keep the size down by using Mini-SAS connectors, much smaller than normal SAS as the name suggests. Each of the ports supports four SAS lanes, so the low profile card ‘only’ has 16 lanes. The full-height card allows for the entire 24 outs without daughter cards.
As you would expect, the full range of accessories is available from the start. Capacitor backed flash is now on the third generation, and there is 2GB of flash to save caches in. For the low profile cards, you can get right angled Mini-SAS cables so 1U server will have no problems getting to silly drive counts or DAS boxes with hundreds of drives. In short, the bar has been raised, 24 is the new 8.S|A
Charlie Demerjian
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