Comments on: Adaptec (by PMC) ASR-8885 12Gb/s PCIe RAID Adapter Review – Raid Testing With 8 HGST 12Gbps SSDs

By: Philipp

Philipp — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 06:44:00 +0000

Fantastic article! I am running a small post production shop. Our network runs on 10Gbe and as I am adding editors our current RAID (a Promise R8 connected via thunderbolt to an iMac server) is starting to become a bottle neck.

I’m currently considering building a Windows 2012 R2 server with one of these Adaptec cards to run either an 8 drive or 16 drive RAID-5. Obviously we can not afford the SSD drives tested here so I am wondering if it would be possible to run an SSD raid based on costumer SSD drives. The top of the line SSD’s from companies such as Sandisk currently achieve 400MB/s with 1TB capacity.

So an 8 bay RAID 5 configuration would give us 7TB of space and run at 2.8GB/s. An 16 bay RAID 5 would give us 15 TB of space and throughput of 6.0GB/s. Are my assumptions here correct?

Would it even be possible to use consumer grade SSDs in a server configuration or will they just die after 3 months use?

Would love to get your thoughts!

By: jokasi

jokasi — Wed, 28 May 2014 13:38:00 +0000

In reply to boe_d. Dear all, is there Host based adopter (HBA) that is compatible with ubuntu operating system.

By: laurens

laurens — Wed, 21 May 2014 08:56:00 +0000

In reply to Ricardo. It does not help with read/writes. It is just a replacement for a BBU. BBU has problems with maintaining voltage, in some cases you will have to empty it to gauge how much power it has, or to increase how it's life expectancy. That is the downside to this, it cannot keep power in check for a too long of period of time. And you will have to empty the BBU and recharge it again. That means in the mean time of a few hours it will use passthrough instead of backed. In most cases it is not tolerateble to have it like that. Since some server has high loads and things might become a bottleneck when it suddenly shut's off.

By: boe_d

boe_d — Sat, 26 Apr 2014 17:51:00 +0000

Unfortunately all I gained from this article was that you are happy Adaptec has raid controllers. If those charts included a performance comparison to a 9271 or even a 9260 I’d have some idea how an LSI benchmarks are in relation to the new adaptec. Just because it is 12G or PCI 3.0 that doesn’t mean it is faster, just that it has access to more bandwidth however the processor may be so slow it gains nothing.

By: Andy

Andy — Fri, 04 Apr 2014 14:44:00 +0000

Are throughput test done in RAID 5 mode?