this is a very interesting unboxing today I have a kit from adaptech this is
their Max IQ kit so what this does is it
actually takes one of their raid cards so here I have an adaptech raid card
this is a I don't even know if the part numberers on there oh yeah there's the part number okay so it's a retail one it
is actually a 5445 if I recall correct oh yeah there
it is it's a 5445 and then you use an SSD in this
case it's an adap Tech rebadged um my
SSD rocks it's a rebadged with adaptech
branding Intel x2e 32 gig so what this
is for and it's pre-loaded with all of the software on the SSD so it's pretty
much ready to go all you have to do is plug in the necessary drives to your
RAID controller so here actually inside here we might as well do a quick
unboxing since we're doing an unboxing
so we've got their storage manager CD should probably download the latest off
the adaptech website as well as drivers and documentation which you can view the
documentation here because it's here or
you can download the latest off the adop tech website uh here this is the part
name these are the toxic or hazardous
substance and elements that I'm guessing it does not
contain uh is below the limit requirement okay zero excellent good um
okay then we have a quick start guide for the SAS raid control roller all
right then here we have a California Proposition isn't oo known to cause
birth defects okay so don't eat this raid card please do not eat it okay here
we have oh this is useful okay so this is a
little guide on SAS connections SAS and
SATA connections so they're showing you all of the different ways that you can
connect a card to uh drives so you can
use one of these with a back you can use one of these to an external box you can
use a splitter with a back plane okay okay so
this back plane actually does the splitting within the back plane this one
actually takes the what is this thing called sff
888 or 887 I can't remember so that's
the internal one it takes one of those and turns it into four SATA connectors
which SATA connectors are identical to SAS connectors physically so you can
actually take one of these and plug it into either a SATA drive or a SAS drive
or you can plug directly into the backs of the drives depends how you want to
roll okay maximize storage with SAS what
do we got here oh here's a little guide to all of the adapt Tech connectors that
you could potentially need so here's where I'll probably figure out um which
one it is yeah sorry it's an sff 887 and
so you need one of these breakout cables to use four drives on this controller
that's pretty straightforward all right cool very nice let's get on to the card
itself so the card comes with either a full sized PCI bracket or a half height
PCI bracket the half height one is here
right there okay so if you have like a
oneu chassis or something like that then that would be useful so it's a 544 uh
it's a 5445 so what that means is it's their
5,000 series card so that means it uses a a premium Intel um radon chip
controller so that means that all the processing is done here so that's the
5,000 series and then the next four means that it has okay the two fours
basically mean that you can either hook up four drives internally or four drives
externally so this is an 8088 and this
is an 8087 connector you can't actually use both at the same time because the
way the routing Works internally on the card there are actually only four data
channels that are available this is a PCI Express 8X card and then it has like
I said it has a a processor here so there's a heat sink these things get
incredibly hot so if you are planning to run a RAID controller in your system
whether it's a server or like a backup solution or a desktop you do want to
make sure you have decent ventilation for the card they actually smell like
they're burning when they're operating normally so that begs the question why
on Earth would you want one of these whether it's for a server or whether
it's for desktop use the reason is that like anything dedicated versus an
onboard version they're just playing better than onboard controllers it uses
like I said a PCIe 8X interface that
means it has a ton of bandwidth available to it compared to a typical
Southbridge based um raid or SATA
controller you can also use SAS drives if you really felt like it but where
they really shine is with ssds so couple
different ways you could use this you could either grab a Max IQ kit which is
quite expensive I have to say and then you can use that as a cache so this is
an SSD cache and it behaves kind of like
the Cate momentus XT so that's that new drive from seate that has a small and in
that case it's a 4 gig SSD built in to
up to a 500 gig hard drive well in this case you are using that SSD cache which
is much larger this is a 32 gig cache it's also one of the fastest ssds around
the x25 x2e and you're using a 32 gig
cache for an entire storage array so
that means that it's going to take all of your frequently accessed data store
it on the SSD so you get lightning fast random reads and wrs for those little
bits of data and then you've also you're also backed up by a bigger storage array
which can be running raid zero raid one raid five and then you can access all of
your bulk data that way so you kind of get the best of both worlds there's a
few Solutions out there like this now but this one is aimed more at a server
Enterprise workstation level and the others like the Silverstone HDD boost or
the momentus XT are aimed at desktop users or laptop users users respectively
the other reason to put a high-end RAID controller in your system is if you're
oh yeah I kind of already mentioned this if you're running a bunch of ssds you
can get huge huge reads and wrs out of a
dedicated RAID controller running like three or four ssds versus if you're
running them on your onboard raid so thank you for checking out my unboxing
of the