Adaptec's Series 2 and Series 5 RAID controller products are 8 lane PCIe cards that provide hardware-based RAID features for from 4 to 28 direct attached SAS or SATA drives; and, when using SAS expanders, from 128 to 256 drives in total (depending on model). The cards themselves are billed as "Unified Serial RAID Controllers," boasting a serial point-to-point interface that enables the connection of both SAS and SATA drives.

The cards ship in a number of internal port/external port configurations, with the Series 2 cards targeted primarily to entry level deployments and the Series 5 cards targeted to high-end uses including Web servers, NAS, OLTP servers, digital surveillance, etc. Among the features common to all cards are:

- Intelligent Power Management, the newest entry in the feature set. Intelligent Power Management is accessed through the vendor's Adaptec Storage Manager software (a Java-based GUI that supports remote configuration, monitoring, and notification including SMTP/SNMP support) and allows drives to be configured to operate in one of three states--full power, low power (spins disk at lower RPMs), and power off modes (disks not spinning)--with banks of drives administrator configurable to operate in differing power states at specified times or according to drive usage patterns. "Blackout" periods can also be specified where the power management features are disabled.

- Support for RAID level migration, automatic/manual rebuild of hot spares, configurable stripe sizes, support for multiple arrays per disk drive, and support for staggered drive spin-ups

- 3 Gb/sec per port interface speeds

The Series 5 cards include support for RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, 60 and JBOD deployments, as well as support for RAID 5EE ("Hot Space," where the hot spare space is distributed within the RAID 5 array); and RAID 1E (mirrors the data stripes rather than the drives, allowing for mirrored protection over an odd number of disks). They also support optional battery backup, a 512 MB cache, and support the connection of up to 256 devices when using SAS expanders. The 7 cards currently in the line support from 4 to 28 direct attached devices (ranging from 4 internal connections in the 5405 to 24 internal and 4 external ports in the 52445) and are driven by a 1.2GHz dual core RAID on Chip (ROC) processor.

The Series 2 cards currently ship in 2 configurations; the 2045 including 4 external ports and the 2405 including 4 internal ports. Both are low profile cards boasting an 800 MHz processor, supporting RAID levels of 0, 1, and 10, and including 128 MB of cache. Up to 128 devices can be driven by the cards using SAS expanders.

The Series 2 and Series 5 RAID Controller cards are available now. Visit the Adaptec Web site for further information.