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Adaptec RAID cards and Mtron SSDs - Dont work

Last response: in Components
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To spare folks the pain I went through, the following does not work:

Adaptec 5445 (or 5 series Raid card) using firmware 16116 and 16120 drivers, with 2x Mtron 7500 (firmware 0.18R1H3) does not work. I tried to use the Adaptec 5445 as a RAID card for a RAID 0 array and after 2 weeks of working with Adaptec, Adaptec admitted that it doesnt work, that Adaptec has purchased Mtron 7500 drives to make a new driver/firmware, but in the end.....that:

-->> Mtron is NOT listed on the 'compatability guide' <<-- for Adaptec 5 Series controllers. Gee thanks.

What does this mean?

If you read Toms Hardware often like I do, and decide to take the 'best' RAID card (listed as a 5 series Adaptec card), and pair it up with nearly the best SSD (Mtron 7500's....., MemoRIGHTs are too expensive) beware for a headache unless there are new drivers. The system was unstable and would 'pause' and eventually lock up after not more than 90 min.

If you want a high end system, and want to user Mtron SSD drives (or any high end SSD drive) and avoid the slow RAID performance from the Intel ICH8R/ICH9R chipset on a motherboard....dont go to Adaptec for help. They are 'working' on it. I thought of Adaptec as a leader for a long time in RAID controllers, but this whole experience really has put a bad taste in my mouth (and wallet).

I ended up getting an Areca 1231ML and it worked out of the box w/o issue....plus it comes with 1gb ram (double Adaptec's), and came with 3x the cables and drive capacity.

What makes you think that the Intel raid is bad? Although it isn't as good for RAID 5 as a dedicated card (due to the parity calculations), it's perfectly fine for RAID 0.

On high end systems, RAID cards provide little performance benefits for RAID0 with 4 drives or less. On the other hand, several RAID cards work with VMware, Linux, etc. For me, that's a compelling reason to buy them, particularly if they don't cost as much as the rest of the system.

nullstar123 said:
If you want top end performance, go for a RAID card. While onboard RAID does work, its not as fast as a dedicated card.

Not really true for RAID 0. Intel's integrated RAID 0 is actually quite fast, and if you enable some of its caching features, it can use a little bit of system ram to allow for significant performance gains. As I said, nothing beats a dedicated card for RAID 5 or 6, but for just a simple, 2 disk RAID 0, I'd be surprised if there was even a measurable performance gain.

Comparing IOP341 dedicated raid cards (highpoint 3520, areca 1231 ...) to ICH10R using pcmark05 with 6xmobi in raid 0 - the dedicated raid cards are faster than ich10r by approx 2000 pcmark05 points even though hdtach sequential read/write looks to be the same (ich10r vs iop341). Ich10r is very good but dedicated pcei cards are better.
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