Adaptec Series 5
RAID Adapters

The Adaptec Series 5 family of next-generation Adaptec Unified Serial™ raid adapters includes controllers with four, eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty and twenty-eight 3Gb/s ports or data paths supporting both Serial ATA (SATA) and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) disk drives. Designed to meet the increasing demands of your company's digital data and bandwidth-hungry applications, the next-generation Adaptec Unified Serial™ Series 5 family of raid adapters blows the circuits off the best offerings from 3ware, LSI, Areca, ATTO and Promise. In speed tests, it out-performs the competition by as much as five times. The family includes the following model numbers: 5405, 5445, 5805, 5085, 51245, 51645 and 52445.

The Series 5 adapters are ideal for bandwidth-intensive storage applications:
NAS, online transaction processing servers (OLTP), web servers, digital surveillance and applications where high levels of sustained read and write operations are required, such as video streaming, web content, video-on-demand, security and surveillance, fixed content, and reference data storage. Each adapter will support both SATA midplane designs with sideband enclosure management and LED signals, as well as a SAS infrastructure with in-band signalling. With this design, the adapters provide compatibility with both SATA-only systems and with new SAS designs too.

SAS/SATA adapters, like the Series 5 family, support both SATA and SAS disk drives using a serial point-to-point interface. The command set is an enriched SCSI command set providing robust data management, error handling and performance characteristics.

This flexibility of supporting both SATA and SAS disk drives makes it easy for companies to standardise on a single I/O infrastructure for both mission-critical storage and secondary storage – dependent solely upon whether SATA or SAS disk drives are installed. Customers can standardise on a single I/O adapter or storage system for all their storage configurations, reducing training and repair costs.

The Adaptec Series 5 RAID adapter family supports standard RAID levels 0, 1, 1E, 5, 5EE, 6, 10, 50, 60 and JBOD. It also supports Copyback Hot Spare, which allows the user to specify a fixed physical location for the hot spare for improved manageability.

The Series 5 RAID adapter family offers a collection of standard and optional features offering customers advanced storage management and data protection features.

Premium RAID Features:

• Dual Drive Failure Protection (RAID 6, 60) delivers the ability to survive two simultaneous drive failures, protecting data during the extended array rebuild times required by new large-capacity disk drives. A RAID 60 array provides optimal data protection by allowing two drive failures for each leg of a multi-layer array. Dual Drive Failure Protection is particularly interesting for use with large-capacity disk drives, which exhibit longer rebuild times. This results in a larger window of vulnerability where a second drive failure (in RAID 5) could bring down a server.
• Hot Space (RAID 5EE) distributes the hot spare space within the RAID 5 array, increasing the number of spindles in the array, and therefore, the I/O performance.
• Striped Mirror (RAID 1E) provides mirrored data protection over an odd number of disk drives by mirroring the data stripes rather than the drives.
• Copyback Hot Spare lets administrators designate a physical drive location as a hot spare. When a failed drive is replaced, the data is copied back to the replaced drive from the spare, and the Hot Spare physical location is maintained as initially assigned.

The Adaptec Series 5 family supports a long list of operating systems including Windows, Linux, NetWare, Solaris, FreeBSD and SCO. Please consult the Adaptec support site for a complete list of available operating systems and drivers.

Adaptec Storage Manager™ – one-view utility that centralises management of all Adaptec RAID products. Adaptec Storage Manager enables remote RAID management, monitoring and configuration through secure, encrypted communication.

ARCCONF (Command Line Interface - CLI) – text-based command line interface that provides the same functions as Adaptec Storage Manager in environments where a GUI is not available.

BIOS configuration utility (ACU) – used for quick and easy local set-up without booting the OS.

Yes, but Adaptec recommends that if write-back cache is enabled, the server should be connected to a UPS. Adaptec believes that data integrity is the most important feature on its RAID cards. Write-back cache is volatile to power drops. To protect data stored in cache in case of a power failure, a UPS must be used.

Yes, there is an optional Lithium ION battery backup module which provides 72 hours of cache memory backup. For the MD2 low-profile adapters, the combined assembly of RAID adapter and battery module maintains the low-profile MD2 form factor. The ABM-800 battery module is sold separately.

Adaptec products are available worldwide from Adaptec Authorised Retail partners. For a reseller near you, go to www.adaptec.com

Like all Adaptec products, the Adaptec Series 5 RAID adapter Family has been extensively tested with third-party systems to deliver the utmost in compatibility, now and in the future. Each is backed by a three-year warranty and Adaptec industry-leading technical support.

Adaptec adapters are tested and supported on all the major vendors' motherboards, enclosures and disk drives. Please visit our website at www.adaptec.com/compatibility for a list of tested components.