Adaptec 5445 SATA SAS RAID Controller & MaxIQ SSD Cache Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,216 words · ~6 min read
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this is a very interesting unboxing today I have a kit from adaptech this is
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their Max IQ kit so what this does is it
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actually takes one of their raid cards so here I have an adaptech raid card
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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
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is actually a 5445 if I recall correct oh yeah there
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it is it's a 5445 and then you use an SSD in this
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case it's an adap Tech rebadged um my
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SSD rocks it's a rebadged with adaptech
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branding Intel x2e 32 gig so what this
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is for and it's pre-loaded with all of the software on the SSD so it's pretty
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much ready to go all you have to do is plug in the necessary drives to your
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RAID controller so here actually inside here we might as well do a quick
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unboxing since we're doing an unboxing
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so we've got their storage manager CD should probably download the latest off
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the adaptech website as well as drivers and documentation which you can view the
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documentation here because it's here or
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you can download the latest off the adop tech website uh here this is the part
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name these are the toxic or hazardous
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substance and elements that I'm guessing it does not
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contain uh is below the limit requirement okay zero excellent good um
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okay then we have a quick start guide for the SAS raid control roller all
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right then here we have a California Proposition isn't oo known to cause
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birth defects okay so don't eat this raid card please do not eat it okay here
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we have oh this is useful okay so this is a
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little guide on SAS connections SAS and
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SATA connections so they're showing you all of the different ways that you can
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connect a card to uh drives so you can
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use one of these with a back you can use one of these to an external box you can
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use a splitter with a back plane okay okay so
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this back plane actually does the splitting within the back plane this one
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actually takes the what is this thing called sff
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888 or 887 I can't remember so that's
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the internal one it takes one of those and turns it into four SATA connectors
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which SATA connectors are identical to SAS connectors physically so you can
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actually take one of these and plug it into either a SATA drive or a SAS drive
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or you can plug directly into the backs of the drives depends how you want to
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roll okay maximize storage with SAS what
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do we got here oh here's a little guide to all of the adapt Tech connectors that
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you could potentially need so here's where I'll probably figure out um which
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one it is yeah sorry it's an sff 887 and
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so you need one of these breakout cables to use four drives on this controller
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that's pretty straightforward all right cool very nice let's get on to the card
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itself so the card comes with either a full sized PCI bracket or a half height
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PCI bracket the half height one is here
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right there okay so if you have like a
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oneu chassis or something like that then that would be useful so it's a 544 uh
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it's a 5445 so what that means is it's their
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5,000 series card so that means it uses a a premium Intel um radon chip
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controller so that means that all the processing is done here so that's the
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5,000 series and then the next four means that it has okay the two fours
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basically mean that you can either hook up four drives internally or four drives
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externally so this is an 8088 and this
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is an 8087 connector you can't actually use both at the same time because the
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way the routing Works internally on the card there are actually only four data
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channels that are available this is a PCI Express 8X card and then it has like
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I said it has a a processor here so there's a heat sink these things get
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incredibly hot so if you are planning to run a RAID controller in your system
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whether it's a server or like a backup solution or a desktop you do want to
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make sure you have decent ventilation for the card they actually smell like
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they're burning when they're operating normally so that begs the question why
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on Earth would you want one of these whether it's for a server or whether
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it's for desktop use the reason is that like anything dedicated versus an
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onboard version they're just playing better than onboard controllers it uses
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like I said a PCIe 8X interface that
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means it has a ton of bandwidth available to it compared to a typical
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Southbridge based um raid or SATA
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controller you can also use SAS drives if you really felt like it but where
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they really shine is with ssds so couple
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different ways you could use this you could either grab a Max IQ kit which is
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quite expensive I have to say and then you can use that as a cache so this is
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an SSD cache and it behaves kind of like
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the Cate momentus XT so that's that new drive from seate that has a small and in
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that case it's a 4 gig SSD built in to
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up to a 500 gig hard drive well in this case you are using that SSD cache which
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is much larger this is a 32 gig cache it's also one of the fastest ssds around
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the x25 x2e and you're using a 32 gig
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cache for an entire storage array so
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that means that it's going to take all of your frequently accessed data store
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it on the SSD so you get lightning fast random reads and wrs for those little
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bits of data and then you've also you're also backed up by a bigger storage array
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which can be running raid zero raid one raid five and then you can access all of
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your bulk data that way so you kind of get the best of both worlds there's a
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few Solutions out there like this now but this one is aimed more at a server
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Enterprise workstation level and the others like the Silverstone HDD boost or
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the momentus XT are aimed at desktop users or laptop users users respectively
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the other reason to put a high-end RAID controller in your system is if you're
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oh yeah I kind of already mentioned this if you're running a bunch of ssds you
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can get huge huge reads and wrs out of a
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dedicated RAID controller running like three or four ssds versus if you're
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running them on your onboard raid so thank you for checking out my unboxing
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of the