Anyone using the Adaptec 6805E Raid Card?

[davidm71]

Saw a deal on that card somewhere for $230 and am tempted but was wondering would it be no better than motherboard raid?

Thanks

 

[Village Idiot]

I've been using the 6805e for about a year without issue. As an HBA it works well and seems to be compatible with most consumer motherboards. If your looking to just add ports "specifically eight" then it does the job well. For raid 0/1/10 I saw no discernible difference compared to Intel or AMD chipset raid using Sata III HDD. How do you plan on using it ?

 

[davidm71]

I have four 300gb enterprise Velociraptors that I have in a raid 5 array off of an X58 motherboard. Performance not that great. Would like to improve upon that though financially am stretched thin right now and the 6805E is price right but has no Raid -5 mode like the 6405 model. Thats just at least hundred dollars more at least but you get 512 mb cache. Want sata III 6gb/sec to future proof my investement just incase I get SSD raid array in future. So looking at going raid 10 or 5 and I prefer 5 as theres more hard drive space available vs raid 10. Though if money was no object I'd go for an Areca 512mb card or the LSI 9260 but thats a $600 dollar card! Ouch!

Thanks.

 

[Village Idiot]

If your looking for Raid 5 support then your probably better off saving up for one of LSI, Areca or Adaptec's other products. Although it's SAS2/Sata III compliant, the 6805e supports Raid 0/1/10 only. It's also capped @ eight ports "doesn't work with SAS expanders" unlike LSI's similar offering "9211-8i". LSI has this and this both provide Raid 5 support ,with the caveat of parity calculations being done by the host processor. So I'm not sure how much benefit you'll see there. For Raid 5, 5EE or 6 where parity calculation are performed by a dedicated proccessor on the card itself, I think you'll have to speed upwards of $300. Another thing to keep in mind is compatibility. I've had issues in the past with LSI products not working in consumer boards, particularly EVGA and Gigabyte. These cards don't always just "work" when you plug them in.

 

[odditory]

Avoid that Adaptec at all costs. $230 is not a deal for a junk card. Since you haven't said what you're using the VR300's for I'll assume you're just looking for more all around responsiveness in Windows doing typical things. If a decent hardware raid controller like an Areca or LSI is not affordable then its time to forget the VR300's and buy an SSD -- they keep hitting $200 for 256GB models. Even with a SATA-II motherboard it will blow away a RAID0 of 4 x VR300's in terms of responsiveness. People get hung up on sequential throughput benchmarks but the magic metric in windows performance is 4K random IOPS, which is where the SSD shines, even on SATA-II. The bottom line is you can't half ass raid with a cheap controller, or you will get burned. And there are very few home usage scenarios anymore that favor raided spinning disks over an SSD, its mostly video and photo editing but even that scenario is standardizing on SSD's as prices fall.

If it was me, I'd sell the VR300's and use the money toward a 256GB Crucial M4 SSD for drive-C, then get a couple 1TB or 2TB disk for Drive-D with one being a mirror of the other (mirrored through file copying rather that striping so they're independent)

If you really want to keep the VR300's, you could buy a 128GB SSD for $100 for drive-C, then buy a $80 IBM M1015 card to attach the VR300's to and run windows software RAID5 or RAID0. Ideally RAID0 if its performance you're after, then buy a 1TB or 2TB as drive-E to have a backup copy of the files on your RAID0 volume. And I say use windows software raid because its less complex than the BIOS-based raid facility on cheapo controllers, and performance-wise you're getting the full throughput of each drive with windows software RAID0, benchmarks are actually pretty impressive relative to letting even a decent hardware controller do the RAID0.

 

[davidm71]

Thanks. Thats some useful info. I'm thinking about the Adaptec 6405 due to its price. Its a four port card though but it has 512mb cache. Got to start saving up!

Thanks.

 

[odditory]

re-read, updated previous post with more options. I still wouldn't put any money into any Adaptec card. I ran Adaptec's for years before LSI & Areca really hit their stride and it became pointless to continue. I know them and the company intimately and performance even on the flagship 6 series controller is mediocre at best. They do work but you're paying a high price for medium performance.

On top of it they dont do true JBOD passthrough which is a hidden gotcha and a big headache - case in point you have an existing single drive formatted NTFS with some files on it you want to copy to an existing volume on the controller. With an LSI or Areca you just attach that single disk to the controller and set it to passthrough and it appears just like if you attached it to the motherboard SATA. On an Adaptec, the "JBOD" function is really just a RAID0 in disguise, and it will insist on "initializing" the disk (meaning wiping out your partition table) just like it would do for a single disk RAID0.

 

[davidm71]

Interesting. I read some newegg user reviews on the Adaptec cards that performance on SSDs is not great but fine for mechanical drives. Read they had a firmware update that fixed some of their problems (not verified though) and the 6805 model is their 'best' but costs close to $500. So you think that its either LSI or Areca? Thing is the LSI cards look cheap. At least there is Mac support on the Areca cards.

Thanks.

Edit: Just reread your edited comments. I already have a 128gb Corsair GT SSD boot disk (two of them actually split along two different computers as boot disks). Just that selling the 300gb Raptors wouldn't pay really and I rather get an affordable good raid card so that Raid -5 performance will shine at 800GB scratch space. I could combine the two Gts for a raid 0 though but once again motherboard raid is it really that good?

 

[odditory]

If you just want fast scratch space and dont want to sell the VR300's then I'd still go IBM M1015 for the VR300's and again, use windows based software RAID0 and set up scheduled file-copy any important files to a spare 1TB or 2TB drive, get a used one or external or whatever. At least that way your CPU isn't being impacted like it would be with host based RAID5 (ie any raid card that isn't doing its own parity calcs which is most of the ones under $300). Or if you want you can experiment with the windows based RAID5 and see how much CPU is being eaten up, it may not make a diff in usability, esp if your CPU is OC'd.

And rather than motherboard raid two SSD's at SATA-II speeds I would also attach the Corsair GT to the IBM M1015 since it supports bootable drives and will pretty much give you the full SATA-III speed. Only minor problem would be TRIM not being enabled since Windows detects the IBM M1015 as a SCSI controller, but the GC on that drive is advanced enough that you wouldn't notice a difference in day to day use. And supposedly Windows 8 will expand TRIM support to SCSI controllers so that issue may be moot in a few months.

 

[Village Idiot]

re-read, updated previous post with more options. I still wouldn't put any money into any Adaptec card. I ran Adaptec's for years before LSI & Areca really hit their stride and it became pointless to continue. I know them and the company intimately and performance even on the flagship 6 series controller is mediocre at best. They do work but you're paying a high price for medium performance.

Agreed, It's simply no contest and hasn't been for some time in the enterprise environment.

On top of it they dont do true JBOD passthrough which is a hidden gotcha and a big headache - case in point you have an existing single drive formatted NTFS with some files on it you want to copy to an existing volume on the controller. With an LSI or Areca you just attach that single disk to the controller and set it to passthrough and it appears just like if you attached it to the motherboard SATA. On an Adaptec, the "JBOD" function is really just a RAID0 in disguise, and it will insist on "initializing" the disk (meaning wiping out your partition table) just like it would do for a single disk RAID0.

JBOD pass through however works just like LSI based products in IT mode. Initialization is only required for logical devices. You can create or delete JBOD devices without losing any data. For me the big issue is power management which works under this scenario "if the OS supports it",LSI for some reason doesn't seem to support this with any the HBA devices I've dealt with.

I just pulled that Hitachi with Windows 8 on it created the JBOD and it shows up like any other disk.

 

[odditory]

Hallelujah then they finally pulled their heads out, haven't touched an Adaptec 5 series in a year but glad to hear they finally changed it, that is unless JBOD passthrough is exclusive to the 6 series.

You're right about the power management though, and something strangely absent from LSI HBA's including the M1015. I've harrassed LSI about this on multiple occasions and the vibe I got was that it was a political/marketing issue more so than a technical one. The "if the O/S supports it" is a cop out on LSI's part because they know damn well their cards aren't going to pass through the power management commands issued by Windows (Linux & friends dont seem to have that problem though).

Anyway if the 6805e is letting you spindown on inactivity (I think that was your point) then for around $230 its actually not bad, and worth the cost difference to an M1015. Spindown is a must for me which is why I keep old Areca 1680's around just to have them run a few systems with JBOD drives.

 

[cantalup]

.....
JBOD pass through however works just like LSI based products in IT mode. Initialization is only required for logical devices. You can create or delete JBOD devices without losing any data. For me the big issue is power management which works under this scenario "if the OS supports it",LSI for some reason doesn't seem to support this with any the HBA devices I've dealt with.
.

as my understand, 3 and 5 series are not JBOD friendly aka pass-through JBOD like HBA LSI..

on LSI HBA, you just do nothing, where the card will passthrough JBOD without addition layer where you do not need to create logical physical drive

adaptec 6 series utilized PMC Sierra IOP, not really sure since do not have

 

[Village Idiot]

Hallelujah then they finally pulled their heads out, haven't touched an Adaptec 5 series in a year but glad to hear they finally changed it, that is unless JBOD passthrough is exclusive to the 6 series.

The Screenshot example was done using a 5405. I have both and the 6805e supports this feature as well.

You're right about the power management though, and something strangely absent from LSI HBA's including the M1015. I've harrassed LSI about this on multiple occasions and the vibe I got was that it was a political/marketing issue more so than a technical one. The "if the O/S supports it" is a cop out on LSI's part because they know damn well their cards aren't going to pass through the power management commands issued by Windows (Linux & friends dont seem to have that problem though).

Anyway if the 6805e is letting you spindown on inactivity (I think that was your point) then for around $230 its actually not bad, and worth the cost difference to an M1015. Spindown is a must for me which is why I keep old Areca 1680's around just to have them run a few systems with JBOD drives.

I recall reading somewhere that spindown works on some of the higher end models 9260 4i for example. Can you confirm that?

 

[Village Idiot]

as my understand, 3 and 5 series are not JBOD friendly aka pass-through JBOD like HBA LSI..

on LSI HBA, you just do nothing, where the card will passthrough JBOD without addition layer where you do not need to create logical physical drive

adaptec 6 series utilized PMC Sierra IOP, not really sure since do not have

All of the LSI based HBA's that I've toyed required flashing to IT mode for direct pass through. Once flashed they work flawlessly. Adaptec on the other hand requires that JBOD disks be created through the cards BIOS or Storage Manager. One strange issue with Adaptec's JBOD implementation is that unformatted disks can't be done this way, they have to be initialized first and only then you can create the JBOD. LSI has them beat hands down in that regard.

 

[davidm71]

Got to say I learned a lot from your replies. Thank you. But was wondering why would you want to do Jbod mode? Isn't that just stringing different drives together? Anyhow now considering the Lsi 9260-4i but it's not for the X58 Classified board in my sig as that one has no free pci-e slots with all the video cards in there. I have two other rigs, one is a Z68 hackintosh I'm using to learn and develop in Ios, and the other is a Crosshair 4 formula board that is my photoshop web design windows machine. So I want to pull those vr300s into the Crosshair. The old X58 board is my gaming machine. Wish it was 6gb/s like the other two but it's got a great 1.2ghz overclock and is more stable than the Crosshair Formula is even at stock clocks. If it wasn't for the fact that those 6970s are like a year old I would have had a single or two gfx card in there in there instead with room for a raid card. Unfortunately the Crosshair couldn't work stable with three gfx cards and constantly hard locked and crashed all the time even with a 1200 watt psu. So I use that system just for business home office use. I know it sounds crazy and if I had more impulse control I would have never got the Crosshair. Has so many issues.

Thanks.

 

[odditory]

I recall reading somewhere that spindown works on some of the higher end models 9260 4i for example. Can you confirm that?

Yes it does, and that was my whole point about LSI seeming to have left power saving features out of lower end controllers for marketing reasons more so than technical ones, based on the peculiar responses I got back from their engineers and support.

 

[odditory]

Got to say I learned a lot from your replies. Thank you. But was wondering why would you want to do Jbod mode? Isn't that just stringing different drives together?

JBOD mode just means it shows up as a plain disk the same as if you plugged a drive into a plain motherboard SATA controller. Some people seek out the JBOD feature of controller cards because they want to run ZFS, or unRAID, or FlexRAID, WHS v1, or various drive pooling plugins, etc.

JBOD tends to be more attractive for storage purposes than performance purposes. Example you're storing bluray movies on a bunch of drives, what's more efficient - having all the drives spin up when you want to watch a movie stored on a striped RAID array, or just one drive that contains the movie spin up while the rest sleep? There's more power savings running JBOD, but only single disk performance in terms of throughput. Other hand, RAID is a performance multiplier, meaning you're getting a combined throughput since a striped array is pulling from multiple disks.

However striped RAID arrays introduce unnecessary risk if you're just storing/archiving data, since the disks are interdependent and only as strong as the weakest link. Any failure has a ripple effect on the other disks, and if you lose more drives than you have parity drives, you lose all your data. Whereas with a JBOD pool, the disks can fail independently of one another and you'd never lose more data than was on the drives that failed. And software like FlexRAID mitigates risk on JBOD pools by creating parity data similar to how QuickPAR works, to give you the same or better protection as what hardware RAID6 provides - I say better because you can create an unlimited number of parity disks with FlexRAID, whereas RAID6 maxes out at 2 and zfs maxes at 3.

 

[cantalup]

All of the LSI based HBA's that I've toyed required flashing to IT mode for direct pass through. Once flashed they work flawlessly. Adaptec on the other hand requires that JBOD disks be created through the cards BIOS or Storage Manager. One strange issue with Adaptec's JBOD implementation is that unformatted disks can't be done this way, they have to be initialized first and only then you can create the JBOD. LSI has them beat hands down in that regard.

You do not need to flash to it mode on current lsi hba. Check on the latest firmware
For lsi hba 92xx. I flash m1015 to latest lsi firmware. All unconfigured drives shown as jbod and can query using smartctl

 

[davidm71]

JBOD mode just means it shows up as a plain disk the same as if you plugged a drive into a plain motherboard SATA controller. Some people seek out the JBOD feature of controller cards because they want to run ZFS, or unRAID, or FlexRAID, WHS v1, or various drive pooling plugins, etc.

JBOD tends to be more attractive for storage purposes than performance purposes. Example you're storing bluray movies on a bunch of drives, what's more efficient - having all the drives spin up when you want to watch a movie stored on a striped RAID array, or just one drive that contains the movie spin up while the rest sleep? There's more power savings running JBOD, but only single disk performance in terms of throughput. Other hand, RAID is a performance multiplier, meaning you're getting a combined throughput since a striped array is pulling from multiple disks.

However striped RAID arrays introduce unnecessary risk if you're just storing/archiving data, since the disks are interdependent and only as strong as the weakest link. Any failure has a ripple effect on the other disks, and if you lose more drives than you have parity drives, you lose all your data. Whereas with a JBOD pool, the disks can fail independently of one another and you'd never lose more data than was on the drives that failed. And software like FlexRAID mitigates risk on JBOD pools by creating parity data similar to how QuickPAR works, to give you the same or better protection as what hardware RAID6 provides - I say better because you can create an unlimited number of parity disks with FlexRAID, whereas RAID6 maxes out at 2 and zfs maxes at 3.

I thought that raid 5 provided security just in case one drive went bad out of a minimum of four drives you can still operate? Thats what I'm looking for data security, and read performance. The other option is raid 10 but that costs you half the storage total space. Not sure about raid 6 though. Interesting enough Tomshardware had a review comparing some of the top 6gb/s raid cards from Adaptec, LSI, and Areca. They found that Adaptec 6805 does the best job at raid 5 performance while LSI is better with SSDs. So guess I'm looking at the adaptec 6805 or 6405 cards maybe.

But out of curiousity are there any raid cards that handle TRIM or garbage collection for SSDs?

Thanks.

 

[drescherjm]

garbage collection for SSDs?

GC is internal to ssds so it should not matter what controller. TRIM on the other hand is not supported by most raid cards in windows. On linux if there is a pass through mode on the controller the filesystem / os will handle the TRIM provided you have a recent enough kernel.

 

[mwroobel]

I thought that raid 5 provided security just in case one drive went bad out of a minimum of four drives you can still operate? Thats what I'm looking for data security, and read performance.

Do not lull yourself into a false sense of security using raid for "data security". Raid is in NO WAY any guarantee of data security. You need to have a coherent backup strategy in addition to any array you build. Too many ignore this fact to their peril. RAID5 arrays are simply an adjunct that allows you greater uptime, not having your array go down due to a failure and saving the time of a restore. Sure if you lose a drive you stay up and don't "lose" your data, but there are many other ways your array can fail in one fell swoop (virus, controller failure, power failure, etc) regardless of how many parity spindles you have. As I have told to many people (some crying after they ignored my advice) RAID is NOT a backup!

 

[davidm71]

Do not lull yourself into a false sense of security using raid for "data security". Raid is in NO WAY any guarantee of data security. You need to have a coherent backup strategy in addition to any array you build. Too many ignore this fact to their peril. RAID5 arrays are simply an adjunct that allows you greater uptime, not having your array go down due to a failure and saving the time of a restore. Sure if you lose a drive you stay up and don't "lose" your data, but there are many other ways your array can fail in one fell swoop (virus, controller failure, power failure, etc) regardless of how many parity spindles you have. As I have told to many people (some crying after they ignored my advice) RAID is NOT a backup!

I understand that point. I once had my raid 5 fail on me once for some reason one of the drives got dropped and lost the whole thing. I thought it was a freak thing related to the motherboard controller. I believe in redundancy in all shapes and form. More backups the better. Your absolutely right on that point!

 

[drescherjm]

Do not lull yourself into a false sense of security using raid for "data security". Raid is in NO WAY any guarantee of data security. You need to have a coherent backup strategy in addition to any array you build. Too many ignore this fact to their peril. RAID5 arrays are simply an adjunct that allows you greater uptime, not having your array go down due to a failure and saving the time of a restore. Sure if you lose a drive you stay up and don't "lose" your data, but there are many other ways your array can fail in one fell swoop (virus, controller failure, power failure, etc) regardless of how many parity spindles you have. As I have told to many people (some crying after they ignored my advice) RAID is NOT a backup!

Fully agreed.

 

[davidm71]

So I have two picks.. The lsi 9266-4i (4 ports) and the Adaptec 6805 (8port non E version). Can get the 6805 for $430 open box but the 9266-4i is at least $500. Anyone vote which card is better?

Thanks

 

[gkovacs]

Avoid that Adaptec at all costs. $230 is not a deal for a junk card.

I'd like to disagree here. I'm using the 6805E in both a Linux and a Windows box, one with 6x WD 500GB the other with 8x Samsung 320GB drives (both in RAID10), and the performance is stellar. Sequential read speeds are close to a multiple of the number of drives (500 MB / s or more), and random access is very good for the file server and virtualization workloads we are using it for (large VM backups happen very fast).

I'm not disagreeing with the point that you should buy an SSD for your OS drive, but the 6805E is very fast and reliable for a hardware RAID10 controller, not sure how a more expensive controller could be better in this regard. So it's definitely not "junk".

Of course if you really need RAID5, it's a different story. But beware: on any type of controller, RAID5 will always be much slower than RAID10 with the same number of drives.