Adaptec SAS 48300

BIOS Version: 2.0-0, Build 1822

Adaptec's SAS 48300 is an entry-level Serial Attached SCSI host adapter. It supports basic RAID levels such as RAID 0, 1 and 1+0, but no sophisticated or nested RAID setups. It doesn't come with an integrated cache memory. But we picked it as it's a reasonable choice and certainly powerful enough to run all hard drives we took a look at. We also asked the hard drive makers about their opinion, and everyone agreed that the SAS 48300 by Adaptec seems to be a good choice.

This is a low-profile PCI-X card, which means that it requires a 64-bit PCI-X slot for 133 MHz operation to unfold its full performance potential, and it can be used in low-profile rackmount servers (2U). As an alternative, you could operate it in a 3.3 V 32-bit PCI slot, but this would immediately create a bottleneck if you intend to run more than a single SAS drive.

The card offers one internal SAS 32 pin x4 connector and one external Infiniband connector. Adaptec provides an internal cable to attach four SAS or SATA drives. If you need to hook up more drives (up to 128 drives are possible), you'll need SAS expanders and preferably external storage hardware.