Adaptec RAID 6805E Storage Controller 2270900-R

No this will not do the job and performance of a unit costing 5 times as much or more. But 8 SATA/SAS ports for under $200.00 (ooops, i see the price just jumped up! Sorry!) with real hardware RAID is pretty compelling.I am using it as of now for a 4 disk RAID 10 array. The arrays sequential read and write times are coming in close to modern SSD performance (in the same Machine I have two Samsung 850 Pro) and this is with relatively slow 5900 RPM Seagate NAS drives.This these leaves me future external capacity for another 4 disk array.One surprising pro ( at least for me ) is it functions FLAWLESSLY with Windows 7 pro & my Asus Z97-Pro main-boards power savings settings. I can walk away form the PC and come back in the morning with the entire thing shut down. No fans or hard drives spinning, no blinky lights. Silence. Press a button on the keyboard and I am back in windows Pro in seconds all ready to go.Coming from the era of Adaptec Ultra Wide SCSI RAID controller, this is nothing short of miraculous to me :) Time was when you installed a card like this one had to use the cards own utilities to control disk power down etc.. and they just could mess up any other power savings.CONS: Unlike the advances they have made in behaving with the OS in having functional power savings, the boot up sequence is even worse than the old days of SCSI! (if that's possible)This card takes longer to initiate than my entire system took to boot to Windows prompt before the card was installed. A lot longer!What are the scanning "NightRider" lights good for on the bottom of the card? You can't see then form anywhere unless you happen to be the Nvidia sitting below it?Anyone that is looking for a good fast RAID card that can work with a lot of disks, this is a good option in a low price point.

Only supports RAID levels 0, 1, 1E, 10 so you need to double disk storage. Good 6Gb/s throughput per port. I haven't tried the hybrid SSD + HDD mode so can't evaluate that. Good HW RAID card that doesn't cost a ton of money, and is much better than the cheap fake-raid cards that impact system performance.

I owned a 6805E for a little less than one month before returning it. Let me start by making it clear that I am not posting to trash the 6805E. Everything that I experienced leads me to believe that the 6805E would be EXCELLENT at driving a large array where all disks are mechanical HDDs.However, I bought the 6805E based on the manufacturer's advertising regarding its Hybrid RAID feature, which is a RAID10 array of two SSDs and two relatively inexpensive HDDs. The idea is to have the performance of a RAID0 of the SSDs but with redundancy to protect against the loss of any one of the four drives.I had expected the 6805E's PCI-e x4 connection and onboard cache to deliver better IOPS than just connecting my Crucial SSDs directly to the motherboard. That isn't the case, at least not when the MB properly implements its SATA 6.0 headers directly through the Intel Z68 chipset, as does my BioStar TZ68A+ MB.The best the 6805E can do with SSDs is to equal a direct MB connection and only then by disabling both read and write caching in the card's onboard cache memory. In my opinion, the problem appears to be that the onboard cache memory has too much latency for use with SSDs.The bigger problem comes when you benchmark Hybrid RAID10 with all four drives connected. Adaptec's Hybrid RAID algorithm takes all reads from the SSDs but splits writes 50%-50% to the SSDs and HDDs. Read speeds are roughly equal to one SSD alone, provided that read caching is turned off, which is good enough performance. But random writes plummet down to 1.29 MBs. This metric is not affected by the write cache setting or queue depth. In my opinion, the better plan (outside of an enterprise) is to put the cost of the 6805E towards the cost of two larger SSDs, and to make a RAID1 of the SSDs directly on the motherboard.

As I posted from my review with my Intel card, this one gave me better speeds for RAID 0. I'm pretty sure the extra RAM helped and the more stable BIOS. Highly recommended if you're looking for an actual hardware RAID card. You can do this in the BIOS or in the software (which you can download from Adaptec's website). Not for the faint of heart though regarding getting everything setup and configured properly. Overall though, it does deliver.

Got this thinking it did RAID5, but the "E" version does not - had to add another drive and go to RAID10. Still, Adaptec controllers get the job done, so no regrets.

solid have used it in several builds lately. supports RAID 10 which is great