Tired of Adaptec

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Perry

Member
Sep 22, 2016
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We've been having major issues with our Adaptec cards. Namely - the web interface, which I use to manage the card from my desktop because it's easier - is utterly useless. It takes almost a minute between each button click before anything updates, and then when it does, it often contradicts what the BIOS tells me about the state of the RAID. It also won't send email notifications, even though other applications we use are able to send emails from that same server. Adaptec tech support took two days to tell me that they wouldn't support our ASR78165 card because it's too old (2014? I have way older LSI and Areca cards running without issues in other machines) unless we pay a fee per incident (and they broke it down into three incidents). so we're basically dead in the water right now with a super flaky RAID card that's not giving me good information so I can't diagnose problems. My hunch is that the card is toast so why bother throwing money at it just to find out it's no good.

Our requirements are as follows:

*SAS RAID Card #1: At least 5 internal SAS ports, to break out to 20 SATA drives in the main server chassis.
*SAS RAID Card #2: At least 4 External Mini-SAS ports to go to expansion JBOD chassis

We need both cards to handle 6Gbps drives, and they need to do RAID 6. A remote GUI interface is preferable - web or an application - doesn't matter. I like to be able to check on this system from home and that makes it a lot easier.

I love LSI cards, but can't find one that has enough ports for the internal. I'd prefer that both cards be the same, so a single interface could be used to manage them. Just makes things easier once it's up and running.
 

Perry

Member
Sep 22, 2016
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LSI cards work well. Can you add an internal SAS expander card to get the number of ports you need?
Possibly. 4 external ports are fairly standard, so that could be used for the JBOD as-is. For the drives internal to the server chassis, since I'll be getting a new (non-norco) enclosure, I could certainly get one with port expansion built in - Supermicro most likely.

I've never used anything other than direct-connected drives. What kind of performance hit, if any, would I see with a sas expander? Any?

For us, reliability is #1, but performance is right behind it. We need to move at least 1GB/second, and will soon start looking at SSD drives, to eke out some more speed.
 

Perry

Member
Sep 22, 2016
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Are the cards running hot by any chance?
I'll be honest, I'm not totally sure. The web interface is utterly useless, even when the machine is booted cold (and i mean literally cold, like it's been off overnight), so I don't think heat is causing that. It's the only interface I have that will let me see the temp. I haven't seen any warnings. I do have a fan for it that we didn't install, because it was running within normal range during our burn-in tests and again when I'd log in periodically to check the system. I haven't seen any log warnings about overheating, either.
 

Perry

Member
Sep 22, 2016
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One other data point - so far the card running the 20 internal drives on the server itself has been perfectly fine. This is just on the one for the external JBOD
 

mb300sd

Active Member
Aug 1, 2016
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You shouldn't see much if any performance hit with an expander if you're running spinners. Never seen one that could saturate a 6g link (makes me wonder why they bother putting 12G SAS3 interfaces on the ones I have when they can't even saturate the SAS2 links)