Software

Adaptec's tremendous bundled software package is evidence of the company's many years of experience with mass storage controllers. The package includes a browser-based management program that can be used locally or by network machines.

In addition to a large contiguous drive, and RAID 0, 1 and 10, it also offers the option of RAID 5 and 50 - the latter option requiring six hard disks (two striped RAID 5 arrays).

For our tests, we chose a RAID 5 four-disk setup. Read and write caching can be activated or deactivated individually. The next step is to specify the size of the stripe and the total capacity of the array. This can be interesting when setting up a RAID 5 array for the storage of important data, for example, with a second RAID 0 array as temporary, fast storage. Adaptec's software shows an excellent degree of flexibility here.

The final step involves initialization and choosing a name for the array. When we selected "build" mode, it took around 90 minutes to initialize our approx. 103 GB array.