Netapp® Go Further Go Further, Faster
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Tom's Guide | Tom's Games NetApp® Go Further Go Further, Faster. Helping Your Business Discover New Ideas www.NetApp.com Ads by Google SEARCH REVIEWS NEWS CHARTS VIDEOS SLIDE SHOWS FORUMS COMPARE PRICES HEADLINE FEEDS | NEWSLETTERS Home » Storage » Solutions & Technology » Shop for Storage Devices Search Now Adaptec's Series 5 Unified Serial Controllers Dissected WD My Book Essential Advanced Search Edition 2.0 External $117.99 Patrick Schmid, Achim Roos April 8, 2008 07:11 500GB Hard Drive Home WD Passport Portable CPU Adaptec Turns Up The Heat On Unified Serial Storage External 320GB Hard Compare the $145.99 Drive Motherboards & RAM Top 5 Lowest Prices by WD Passport External Graphics & Displays Hovering Your $85.99 160GB Hard Drive Storage Mouse Over the Product Names Seagate Barracuda Hard Drives On the Left 7200.11 ST3500320AS $104.99 Storage Adapters 500GB Hard Drive Optical Storage WD Passport External $129.95 External Storage 250GB Hard Drive Technology See More Products in Storage Devices Charts Peripherals Build Your Own The Channel Guide Blogs WD My Book Essential Edition 2.0 WD Passport Portable External Universal Command Guide External 500GB Hard Drive 320GB Hard Drive Price: $117.99 Price: $145.99 Jobs Archives A RAID controller certainly isn't a product that users buy at retail. Although almost all controller products are indeed available through e-tail and retail channels, more typical customers are system builders who WD Passport External 160GB Hard Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 require the controller to power their storage solutions. The new Adaptec Drive ST3500320AS 500GB Hard Drive Price: $85.99 Price: $104.99 Series 5 RAID controller family is designed to power workstations, servers with DAS storage, SAN appliances, NAS storage and other related solutions, which are crucial for small, medium and large businesses. We wanted to know how the new combined SAS/SATA cards compare to the established competition, and that's what we're going to find out. Storage controller cards were once an essential component of PCs, providing the basic connectivity for drives that is now built into chipsets. Compare products side-by-side, real-time! No longer needed in that market, storage add-on cards have now moved LATEST CHARTS See example chart into business segments with specific applications. Servers and workstation systems typically require sophisticated RAID controllers; high-end desktops or enthusiast systems don't. But the current generation of RAID controller cards is not only powerful and extremely flexible, but also amazingly scalable - they can be used with low-cost SATA or high-end VGA Multi VGA CPU M CPU Hard Disk SAS hard drives, hooking up drives internally or externally. (Compare FIND BY TOPIC Prices on Adaptec RAID Controllers) Audio Headphones Camcorders Laptops Before the introduction of SAS (Serial Attached SCSI), a controller's Cases Media Players market positioning was defined purely by its interface: UltraATA or SATA Cell Phones Monitors controllers were entry-level hardware for SMBs, while SCSI products Cooling Motherboards catered to enterprise applications due to their more sophisticated features CPU MP3 Players and flexible connectivity. Today, SAS controllers are referred to as Unified Desktops Networking Serial controllers, which means that a SAS device can handle and even Digital Cameras PDAs mix both SAS and SATA hard drives. Each SAS controller offers a certain DVD Players Peripherals number of ports, but SAS allows you to run four 300 MB/s SAS Games and Gear Printers connections through a multi-lane cable for drives or expanders. SAS edge GPS Speakers expanders enable administrators to connect additional drive appliances to Graphics Cards Televisions create a so-called SAS domain. All drives in such a domain - which has Hard Drives WiFi similarities to Ethernet with its switches - are managed by the Unified Serial controller. SLIDE SHOWS The Unified Serial controller market must be differentiated based on port count - since sophisticated models require tremendous internal bandwidth - as well as feature set. Unified Serial RAID can also be created by having the system processor take care of all processing workloads (host-based Click on an image to open a Slide Show. More Slide Shows RAID), or by providing dedicated hardware acceleration (hardware RAID). MOST POPULAR PRODUCTS Adaptec's new Series 5 PCI Express RAID controllers are based on a 1.2 DUB-H7 7-Port USB 2.0 Hub GHz dual core storage processor, provide a very comprehensive feature Lowest Price: $27.28 set, and come in eight different flavors with four to 28 ports in internal and/or external port configurations. Let's look at them in detail. Wireless USB Hub & Adapter Lowest Price: $100.72 Join our discussion on this article! Sabrent USB 2.0 to IDE/SATA Cable for 2.5" / 3.5" / 5.25" Drive with Power Adapter USB-DSC5 Lowest Price: $16.95 Digg this article | Email this article | Permalink Premium 4-Port USB Hub for Notebooks Lowest Price: $21.99 2PORT IEEE-1394 FIREWIRE CARDBUS LAPTOP PAGE 1 of 13 Next Page CARD Lowest Price: $25.95 TABLE OF CONTENTS Ads by Google SAS / SATA Storage Server 3Ware RAID expands up to 100 TB Building Storage Servers since 1999 www.pogolinux.com SATA/ eSATA HDD Enclosure Serial ATA Hard Drive External Case 3.5", 2.5", SATA/eSATA/USB Combo www.xPCgear.com SATA Products @ Low Price CoolDrives sells All SATA and eSATA Cables Cards, Raid Enclosures Etc. www.cooldrives.com Direct Attached Storage sas, 4 gb fibre, scsi, sata Sata Raid, SAS/Sata www.areasys.com MicroNet eSATA Raid Array up to 4TB starting from $589 compact, bundled w/ raid controller www.Micronet.com SATA - Serial ATA Cards PCI and Cardbus cards including IDE, USB and FireWire combo cards www.startech.com Advertising | About Us | Contact Us | Newsletter | RSS | Legal | Terms of Use | Privacy | Site Map Tom's Hardware Tom's Guide Tom's Games Forums Compare Prices CPUs Computing Gaming CPU & Components Computers Mobos & RAM Digital Entertainment Film & TV Overclocking Photography Graphics & Displays Entertainment Books & Comics Motherboards & Memory Consumer Electronics Storage Miscellaneous Culture & Politics Homebuilt Systems Video Games Peripherals Mobility Storage Movies Build Your Own Graphic & Displays Software Office Equipment Select a Region: China | France | Germany | Hungary | Italy | Poland | Russia | Sweden | Taiwan | Turkey | UK & Ireland Tom's Hardware is part of Bestofmedia Network Tom's Guide | Tom's Games NetApp® Go Further - Go Further, Faster. Helping Your Business Discover New Ideas www.NetApp.com Ads by Google SEARCH REVIEWS NEWS CHARTS VIDEOS SLIDE SHOWS FORUMS COMPARE PRICES HEADLINE FEEDS | NEWSLETTERS Home » Storage » Solutions & Technology » Shop for Storage Devices Search Now Adaptec's Series 5 Unified Serial Controllers Dissected WD My Book Essential Advanced Search Edition 2.0 External $117.99 Patrick Schmid, Achim Roos April 8, 2008 07:11 500GB Hard Drive Home WD Passport Portable CPU Storage Controller Fundamentals External 320GB Hard Compare the $145.99 Drive Motherboards & RAM Top 5 Lowest Basic storage controllers can be found on every PC-type motherboard as Prices by WD Passport External Graphics & Displays a part of the chipset core logic. Serial ATA (SATA) has been the Hovering Your $76.50 160GB Hard Drive Storage dominating interface for hard drives for some time, and is increasingly Mouse Over the Product Names also used for optical drives such as CD, DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-ray Hard Drives WD Passport External On the Left $129.95 devices. Other drives, based on Flash memory or other technologies, 250GB Hard Drive Storage Adapters typically are attached via SATA as well. Optical Storage Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS $104.99 External Storage Professional hard drives utilize the SAS interface (Serial Attached SCSI), 500GB Hard Drive which is a serialized version of the parallel SCSI bus (Small Computer Technology See More Products in Storage Devices System Interface). SAS controllers, however, are dual-ported, meaning Charts that drives can be connected with redundant connections, or to double Compare products side-by-side, real-time! See example chart Peripherals the interface bandwidth. SAS also supports four 300 MB/s connections per LATEST CHARTS Build Your Own SAS cable (SFF-8087 for internal use or SFF-8088 for external The Channel Guide applications), which can be used for SAS or SATA hard drives. Since SAS offers considerably more flexibility, it is more complex, and hence SAS Blogs controllers cannot yet be found integrated onto motherboard core logic. Universal Command Guide VGA Multi VGA CPU M CPU Hard Disk Jobs Many upper class on-board controllers support RAID configurations, which FIND BY TOPIC Archives means that they can utilize multiple hard drives configured as one array Audio Headphones to provide redundancy or better performance. If you look into the SMB Camcorders Laptops and enterprise space, an on-board controller doesn't get you anywhere, Cases Media Players as arrays consist of many hard drives and offer sophisticated redundancy Cell Phones Monitors options (RAID 51, RAID 6), which require a huge amount of processing Cooling Motherboards power. Also, array configuration and management is an issue that has to CPU MP3 Players be handled efficiently in businesses, requiring proper, web-based Desktops Networking GigaByte i-RAM Memory Board solutions. Digital Cameras PDAs Price: $125.99 DVD Players Peripherals Some RAID controllers, such as the Raidcore RS5200 family by Ciprico, Games and Gear Printers run host-based RAID, but the majority of Unified Serial controller GPS Speakers hardware utilizes its own storage processor. Adaptec, Areca, Atto, ICP and Graphics Cards Televisions LSI have been using Intel IOP 80333 or 348 engines; only AMCC uses its Hard Drives WiFi own PowerPC-based storage processor. The new Adaptec Series 5 uses a dual core storage processor, which unfortunately isn't specified any SLIDE SHOWS PNY 2 Channel PCIe SATA II RAID Card - 4 Port further.