Premium Controllers Under Scrutiny: Ultra160 RAID Adapters from Adaptec and LSI

LSI Logic MegaRAID Elite 1650

The LSI controller was delivered without any special packaging to speak of. The actual circuit board, by contrast, accommodates a host of components: in addition to the RISC processor 80303 (center) and the SCSI controller (left), this board also accommodates a battery (right) designed to maintain the contents of the 32-256 MB cache memory (top) even if a brownout occurs.

The rear offers a connection to the SCSI bus for each bus. Like the Adaptec device, the Elite 1650 from LSI works both in 32 bit, as well as 64 bit, PCI busses. Clock speeds of 33 or 66 MHz are supported, meaning that a maximum transfer rate of 528 MB/s is possible.

The LSI controller's two channels are clearly visible in the picture.