Adaptec 1210SA review

These shiny new Serial ATA hard drives are all well and good, but what if you don't have a Serial ATA controller on your motherboard? Well we'd suggest that you upgrade your motherboard as it won't cost you a fortune and it will probably add a load of features such as Gigabit LAN and decent integrated audio, but you may not feel like pulling your PC to pieces just yet. More seriously you may want to add Serial ATA to a server or small form factor PC and changing the motherboard simply may not be an option.

Thankfully Adaptec has solution in the shape of a PCI controller card. It's a simple enough device that uses a Silicon Image Sil3112A controller chip, like many of the motherboards on sale today. The card has a choice of a regular bracket, or a low-profile bracket for small cases, and it has two internal Serial ATA connectors that support two Serial ATA drives as basic drives, or in RAID 0 or 1 configurations. In RAID 0 the two drives are striped for performance, while in RAID 1 the drives are mirrored for data security.

We were surprised to see that Adaptec supports a very limited range of Operating Systems, which are Windows XP Professional, Windows XP Home Edition, Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Windows 2000 Professional, RedHat Linux 7.3, RedHat Linux 8.0, SuSE Linux 8.0 and SuSE Linux 8.1 so there's not a sniff of Windows 9x. This is odd as plenty of motherboards with the same controller chip happily support Windows 98 and Me. In another quirk, you can't just install the card and feed the driver CD to Windows, but instead you first have to run a 'Make driver' utility that copies the relevant files to a floppy. This seems a little archaic, but Adaptec's products are generally of more relevance to the professional IT market than they are to the home user.

To reinforce this point, Adaptec has included management software to help system administrators. Adaptec Storage Manager Browser Edition uses your browser to give you remote control over the hard drives, in much the same way that you configure a network access point.

We tested the card with a pair of WD Raptor 10,000rrpm drives in RAID 0 and the performance was impressive, just as you would expect. We saw blistering performance in HD Tach but were unable to carry out representative file transferring tests as we would have needed another pair of Raptors or the other hard drive would have acted as a bottleneck. Of course we know that Raptors are very fast in a RAID array, but clearly the Adaptec card was playing its part.

In back-to-back tests it performs as well as Intel's ICH5R Southbridge, which is part of the current crop of performance Pentium 4 motherboards. CPU overhead was also similar to an integrated controller, so the PCI card carries no performance penalty.

We consider that the Adaptec is an expensive item at just over £50, as the cash would go a long way towards a new motherboard with Serial ATA RAID built in. Using a PCI controller card does have one advantage over an integrated controller however, in that you can definitely move your hard drive array from one PC to another. With an integrated controller you can find that something as simple as a BIOS update breaks the array beyond repair.

Verdict

A good product if you desperately need Serial ATA support but don’t want to change your motherboard. On the whole though, a new motherboard could cost only a little more and add many new features to your system besides Serial ATA.

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