I’m using 3 of these in one server. I paid closer to double the price with a battery backup. I like the card. Does raid and hba passthrough through the simple boot gui.
How do these compare to the LSI SAS HBAs that are often recommended in this forum?
Do they have similar performance and capabilities?
Also, I was looking at the product specs and it seems that the last product you linked to does not appear to be equivalent to the first two (ASR-71605E vs. ASR-71605). It has less cache (256MB vs 1024MB) and doesn’t seem to support as many built in RAID levels. Even though it is likely that many people in this forum will be using it in IT mode, the lack of RAID levels may be a factor for some members.
Wow good catch, I got the 2274400-R which has raid 5, 6 and 10 and I think with a firmware upgrade 60. The E is little more than a mirror or hba controller. I got my lsi cards for $20-45 delivered and/or flashed to IT mode.
I know this is a bit of an old thread but I wanted anybody who is interested to know that I stumbled on a listing for this HBA. The price is a little higher than the original post, but not by much.
It requires constant airflow. I have surplus of new old stock phenom and FX heat sink fans, I attach them via the stock heat sink screws and E6000 adhesive, it is easy to remove if needed but strong and vibration proof rubber type material.
I see several eBay listings for ASR-71605 cards right now in the $20-$40 range, so they’re out there. There are multiple ASR-78165 listings for about $30, which is a killer deal and maybe worth it’s own thread. 8 SAS2 lanes internal and 16 external, which you can could just loop back to an expander in the same chassis for more internal ports. I was also able to find an ASR-8885 for about $60.
The Adaptec nomenclature is:
Card generation, 7 is 6Gbps SAS2, 8 is 12Gbps SAS3.
Number of internal lanes (0/4/8/16)
Number of external lanes (0/4/8/16)
Not sure, but usually 5?
So an ASR-78165 is a 7th gen Adaptec card (SAS2) with 8 internal lanes (2x SFF-8643) and 16 external (4x SFF-8644).
A lot of these Adaptec cards are getting advertised as “4-port” for some reason, possibly explaining the low prices (aside from being less will known than LSI). They’re single-chip PCIe3 x8 cards equivalent to LSI 9207/9302/9305 cards for about half the price.
There’s also the AEC-82885T expander for $25, which is also excellent . It’s SAS3, can do 24 drives internally, uplink to an HBA externally or internally, and can daisy chain if you want several DAS off one HBA. Powered by either the PCIe shot or Molex connector, like the Intel expander, but with useful external ports. With a single 4x 12Gbps uplink and 24 drives you’d have about 200MB/s per drive for all-drive tasks. Nifty.
