Adaptec RAID 5805 2244100-R SATA/SAS 8 internal ports w/ 512MB cache memory Controller Card, Kit

Pros: I have some experience using controllers, and raid arrays. I have had my losses and I've had my share of successes. This is my third personal card. Using Highpoint HBAs in the past. This does run quick, easy to set up, can support multiple arrays, and with a battery there is more piece of mind for my storage.

Cons: Does run hot, but if you "READ" the description beforehand, you would know this. Anyone buying these types of cards should always assume that they are intended to run in a server environment, meaning Loud air moving fans, temperature controlled environment and constant monitoring. I run this in an older XW9300 HP Workstation with 2 Raptor (soon Crucial M4's) drives for boot, and 6 1.5TB WD1501FASS Black drives in a raid 6. This is my file server/testbed for school (BSIT), It does run warm, and in my 75* room, a normal 80mm fan strapped to the PCI slots keeps it cool.

Other Thoughts: Please don't claim high Tech Knowledge if you don't have it. You want the fastest of the fast, this is not what you want, spend the cash and get a newer SATA III SSD. If you want reliability, with a controller that can handle up to 256 drives (I.E. HP MSA60 Storage) then get this.

Fair warning... It does take a while to boot, as others have mentioned, if your machine stays on, like a server, this should not be an issue. If you set up your monitoring, research before hand, and use compatible disks, you should not run into ANY issues. I will definitely be buying another in the future for another project, but it will be one that supports SATA III.

Pros: I really don't have anything good to say, couldn't get to working right over a year ago, brushed off the dust and tried it again and I think I'll just throw it in the trash this time.

Cons: I really don't like this product. it's terminally slow and picky. 1-2 minutes to boot the BIOS. if I build a software raid-5 it takes less than 30 min but with this card it takes over 6 hours. g**d forbid you have a disk failure with this thing. the noise is louder than a smoke detector and it will not stop. if a disk even boots slow it will mark it offline and off goes the smoke detector. I can't get past the 2 minute boot time before I want to scream.

Other Thoughts: I'm using the LSI on my other PC, it doesn't take 2 minutes to boot that card and I've never had the smoke detector alarm go off even when there was a disk failure. It should probably stay in a server room as opposed to anyone's home setup.

Pros: Adaptec SAS RAID Controller

Cons: Caution, this SAS controller comes with SATA pig tails, so if you are adding SAS drives with SAS conectors you will need to get your own adapters, and at $8-$12 bucks a pop x 8 ports.. that = money and extra time

Pros: I get decent starting speed when reading or writing, not so much after. It doesn't fail after booting

Cons: It only boots about 30-50% of the time.

If it does boot it takes 30+ seconds.

I have 6 2tb RE4 drives in raid 5. Transferring a movie over gbit lan will go at 110MB/s(max for the lan) for the first 700MBs or so but then slows to a crawl(10-25MB/s) after that, same story with reads and writes, this was to and from a 500MB/s SSD. The card is installed on a newer i5 gaming board with Windows Home Server 2003

Other Thoughts: it has pretty lights

Pros: Easy to install and get drives connected. RAID setup is straight forward and intuitive. Currently building a RAID 5 with 6 1TB drives, but I haven't had it long enough to get an idea of how fast it performs.

Cons: UEFI Support: Adaptec does not officially support UEFI for their RAID cards as of yet according to their site:

http://ask.adaptec.com/scripts/adaptec_tic.cfg/php.exe/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=17087&p_created=1305289854

With that said, after some testing I was able to get it to work with my Asrock Z68 Extreme4 board but only in the very LAST PCIe slot.

Other Thoughts: Bottom line: Do your research prior to ordering this card to ensure compatibility. I got lucky...

Pros: Handles multiple RAIDs without a problem. Adaptec Storage Manager works well with Windows 7 64bit edition. Got Channel 0, Devices 0 + 1 on RAID 1 for the OS. Got Channel 1, Devices 0, 1, 2, and 3 setup up as a RAID 6 for our Data. 6 hard drives in total.

Cons: Instruction manuals where not intuitive and not very helpful with regard to setting up multiple RAID volumes. If we had not called adaptec tech support we would have been lost without a clue. Their support que was a little slow, but once they did get on the line they were super helpful.

Also their cables that come with the Kit are not labeled for Channel 0 vs. Channel 1. This is really bad because on the day you have to replace a bad drive you will have to remember which cable connected to channel 0 and which one connected to channel 1. The connectors on the card itself for Channel 0 and Channel 1 are also NOT labeled well. They only way to figure out which connect is Channel 0 vs. Channel 1 is look for this very small label imprinted on the board that says CN# etc. Not cool Adaptec, for this much cash and in consideration of the fact that Adaptec practically invented the RAID card I would expect more. The solution for this is to label each drive or drive bay CN 0 - Device 0, etc.

Other Thoughts: The led hard drive activity cables from our case would not reach the led activity connectors on the Adaptec card. So we plug them straight into the motherboard hoping the Adaptec card and the mobo would "talk" to each other when the hard drives where working. Turns out they did and the case hd activity led seems to be functioning correctly.

Pros: F F F A A A S S S T T T

On a ridiculous level... I have never seen anything perform so fast in Raid 0, 10, and 5. Even raid 5EE was rediculous.

I am going to be doing a Raid 50 as soon as I get 4 more HDDs.

Just blazing. Absolutely blazing. Peak output in a 4 wd1000FALS raid 0 was over 800MBps (Big B).

This thing also has very strong support for specialized capabilities with SSD's. I dont know how it performs but I am sure it will please in that arena also.

Cons: No cons other than running very hot. Slap a small 40mm cooling fan on it and you are good to go.

Other Thoughts: Great product. Make sure you pay the extra 45ish dollars and get the included cables. 2 SFF 8087 internal fan cables at the regular store is over $35.00 each.

Pros: Fantastic performance at the RAID levels you want
Rock solid hardware + OS driver support

Cons: Some people like the Adaptec Storage Manager - I personally think it's rather clumsy and convoluted. In comparison, the 3ware web control panel actually reveals more information (like drive temperatures, etc.) with fewer clicks and is more intuitive to me.

Other Thoughts: I haven't used this card with any SSD drives. Check Adaptec's drive compatibility list before proceeding.

Make sure you update firmware and use the latest drivers from Adaptec's site.

I had some problems with a set of cables that 1 of the cards came with which didn't detect drives on 1 port; opened a ticket with Adaptec and they UPS Expressed me a new cable within 1 business day.

This card is rock solid - I have 3 running on Xeon 5500 boards on Server 2008 R2 x64 serving plenty of VMs. Depends on purpose, but I typically use:
- WD RE3 500GB drives in RAID 10 for high IO
- WD RE3 1TB drives in RAID6 for storage
- Samsung HD203WI 2TB 5400 RPM for archive

Pros: Fastest card I've ever tested. Nice menu layout, nice email feature, works perfect. I wish I woulda bought the 16-port version.

Cons: Cannot replace the small heatsink. They should have deployed a larger heatsink for such as honkin big processor, or at least gave us the option to install our own.

Other Thoughts: I wanted to put the huge Zalman vga cooler on this but alas I cannot, the stock is glued on. So I installed a PCI slot fan directly underneath it, and stuck aluminum fins on all the integrated memory chips, works great. Now it doesn't even get warm. Though this thing may catch fire if the fans fail.

Pros: 8 SATA drive support.
Easy boot setup.
Running 8 SATA drives in a RAID 10 with no issues.

Cons: No external port.

Other Thoughts: This card is running 8 WD RE3's in a RAID 10.
Included breakout cables are 'just' long enough for most rack servers, but did take a little creative cable routing.
Windows GUI software is basic and easy to use.
Watch out for that Server 2008 2 TB drive limit. Cured by setting up multiple arrays in the Adaptec boot menu.