Adaptec launched a 4-port Serial ATA RAID controller for high-end PCs on Monday, attempting to lower the cost of Serial ATA for small and medium businesses.
The four-port 2410SA card supports up to four Serial ATA drives, providing RAID functionality of RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD. Adaptec currently ships a two-port card as well as a zero-port card for motherboard manufacturers shipping embedded RAID cards.
Adaptecs 2410SA is priced at a suggested price of $390, the same price as Adaptecs similar four-port parallel ATA card. “We want to make sure our customers arent penalized moving from parallel ATA to serial,” said Carvilla Dossett, a product marketing manager for Adaptec.
The card ships with a feature Adaptec calls “optimized free space”, the ability to add a larger disk drive to the array at some future time. With other cards, the extra space would be wasted, Dossett said. But Adaptecs feature allows the extra disk capacity to be treated as a JBOD virtual array, or it can be paired with other drives to create another array.
The card ships in a low-profile PCI card form factor, and includes up to 64 Mbytes of cache. The card supports 48-bit addressing, to allow volume sizes larger than 137 Gbytes. Operating-system support includes Windows 2000 and Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Linux distributions from Red Hat, and SUSE, plus SCO UNIX and Caldera Open UNIX.