Gadgetory

this is a very interesting unboxing today I have a kit from Adaptec this is their Max i-q kit so what this does is it actually takes one of their raid cards so here I have an Adaptec raid card this is a I don't even know if the part numbers on there oh yeah there's the part number okay so it's a retail one it is actually a fifty four forty five if I recall yeah there it is it's a fifty four forty five and then you use an SSD in this case it's an Adaptec rebadged my SSD Rox it's a rebadged with a dap cap branding intel x.25 ii 32 gig so what this is for and it's preloaded with all of the software on the SSD so it's pretty much ready to go all you have to do is plug in the necessary drives to your RAID controller so here actually inside here we might as well do a quick unboxing since we're doing an unboxing so we've got their storage manager CD should probably download the latest off the adapt tech website as well as drivers and documentation which you can view the documentation here because it's here or you can download the latest off the tech website here this is the part name these are the toxic or hazardous substance and elements that I'm guessing it does not contain ah is below the limit requirement okay zero excellence good um okay then we have a Quick Start Guide for the SAS RAID controller alright then here we have a California Proposition isn't it known to cause birth defects okay so don't eat this raid card please do not eat it okay here we have well this is useful okay so this is a little guide on SAS connections SAS and SATA connections so they're showing you all the different ways that you can connect a card to drives so you can use one of these with a backplane you can use one of these to an external box you can use a splitter with a backplane okay okay so this backplane actually does the splitting within the backplane this one actually takes the what is this thing SFF eighty eighty eight or eighty eighty seven I can't remember so that's the internal one it takes one of those and turns it into four SATA connectors which SATA connectors are identical to SAS connectors physically so you can actually take one of these and plug it into either SATA drive or a SAS drive or you can plug directly into the backs of the drives depends how you want to roll ok max my storage with SAS what do we got here oh here's a little guide to all of the Adaptec connectors that you could potentially need so here's where I'll probably figure out which one it is yeah sorry it's an SFF 8087 and so you need one of these breakout cables to use for drives on this controller that's pretty straightforward alright cool very nice let's get on to the part itself so the card comes with either a full sized pci bracket or a half-height pci bracket light ones here right there ok so if you have like a 1u chassis or something like that then that would be useful so it's a 54 for up it's a 54 45 so what that means is it's their 5000 series card so that means it uses a premium Intel raid on chip controller so that means that all the processing is done here so that's the 5000 series and then the next four means that it has ok the two fours basically mean that you can either have got four drives internally or four drives externally so this is in 8088 and this is an 80 87 connector you can't actually use both at the same time because the way the routing works internally on the card there are actually only four data channels that are available this is a PCI Express 8 X card and then it has like I said it has a processor here so there's a heatsink these things get incredibly hot so if you are planning to run a RAID controller in your system whether it's a server or like a backup solution or a desktop you do want to make sure you have decent ventilation for the card they actually smell like they're burning when they're operating normally so that begs the question why on earth would you want one of these whether it's for a server or whether it's for desktop use the reason is that like anything dedicated versus on board version they're just plain better than onboard controllers it uses like I said a PCIe 8x interface that means it has a ton of bandwidth available to it compared to a typical self bridge based raid or SATA controller you can also use SAS drives if you really felt like it but where they really shine is with SSDs so a couple different ways you could use this you could either grab a max IQ kit which is quite expensive I have to say and then you can use that as a cache so this is an SSD cache and it behaves kind of like the Seagate Momentis XT so that's that new drive from Seagate that has a small and in that case it's a 4 gig SSD built in to up to a 500 gig hard drive well in this case you are using that SSD cache which is much larger this is a 32 gig cache it's also one of the fastest SSDs around the X 25 X 25 e and you're using a 32 gig cache for an entire storage array so that means that it's going to take all of your frequently accessed data store it on the SSD so you get lightning-fast random reads and writes for those little bits of data and then you've also you're also backed up by a bigger storage array which can be running raid 0 raid 1 raid 5 and then you can access all of your bulk data that way so you kind of get the best of both worlds there's a few solutions out there like this now but this one is aimed more at a server Enterprise a workstation level and the others like the silverstone HDD boost or the Momentis xt are aimed at desktop users or laptop users respectively the other reason to put a high end RAID controller in your system is if you're oh yeah I kind of already mentioned this if you're running a bunch of SSDs you can get huge huge reads and writes out of a dedicated RAID controller running like 3 or 4 SSDs versus if you're running them on your onboard raid so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the