While Ultra160 SCSI made its debut a long time ago, all of the SCSI controller manufacturers have been slow to release the perfect vehicle for this technology: Raid cards. Adaptec, one of the biggest Ultra160 trumpet blowers, has only just made the jump into this market with the purchase of DPT.

The wait has partly been generated by Adaptec, which instead of carrying out more than a quick rebranding exercise, decided to take the existing cards and refit some of the major chips and components.

The biggest change is with the installation of the Trident II Ultra160 SCSI chip. This is the same chip used on Adaptec's Ultra160 SCSI host adapters, and it controls the SCSI channels.

On top of the hardware changes, Adaptec has also changed the software bundle, and now all of the cards ship with a copy of Storage Manager Pro. This application allows local and remote administration of Adaptec cards.

The latest product range consists of a single, dual, and quad channel host adapter. Of these, we have the quad-channel 3400S on review, which is a three-quarter-length card.

Connection to the server is through a 66Mhz 64bit PCI interface that provides the card with the 640Mbps it needs to use all four channels simultaneously. Onboard the cards are dual 144-pin SO-Dimm - notebook memory slots - which provide the caching for the card.

While the card is sold with 32Mb installed in a single slot, this can be upgraded to 128Mb instead. An upgrade option for the card is to opt for a rechargeable battery. This makes sure that the Raid information stored on the card remains safe, even if there's a long-term power disruption.

Flicking through the manual, we had a look at what Raid features the card can offer. In addition to the standard Raid levels of 0, 1, and 5 - striping, mirroring, and striping with parity - the card also offers levels 0/1 and 0/5. These modes combine multiple striping packs with fault tolerant Raid levels for protection and speed.

To examine the card operating, we connected it to two Ultra160 hard drives, and plugged the card into a Windows NT4 server running Service Pack 6a. The first task was to install the drivers so that Windows would recognise the new hardware.

Having inserted the provided CD, we were then prompted for a single reboot. The only job left now was the Raid configuration of the drives. For this, we decided to install the Adaptec Storage Manger software, which allows remote management of Adaptec products.

This is a significant departure from the software that always used to be distributed, and that's a shame, as it's actually not as good. To start with, the installation caused us a few headaches. We opted to perform the default installation, which we assumed would install everything we needed to run. Unfortunately, after the installation had completed we couldn't find a way of running the management console.

The reason was that while the installation had copied the files that were necessary for control through a console, the console itself hadn't been copied. In the end we had to reinsert the CD, start the installation and add the console component.

A basic interface presents a graphical view of the physical SCSI devices inside the computer. Double-clicking an icon, the host adapter, brings up a properties dialogue box. From here, we selected the 'switch view' button, which brought up a graphical view of the logical drives. This has the same functionality as the previous screen, with the same style of properties dialogue boxes. So far, we can only say that it's ugly but it works.

Testing conditions
Our real problems only kicked in when we tried to make a new Raid array. Selecting the 'Create Array Group' seemed like a good starting point, but this brought up some confusion.

First the Raid level has to be decided upon, which seems a little strange as this is partially determined by the number of drives in a pack. For example, Raid 1 has to have an even number of drives to work.

We opted to create a Raid 0 array to work with. The next screen asked us which drives we wanted to include in the array. We selected both of the drives, and clicked the 'done' button.

Unfortunately, this doesn't create a new array, and quits back to the front screen of the management software. This meant that we had to go through the same procedure again, but instead select the 'Include Drive' button. It's a confusing procedure, and we never had this problem with the old software.

As soon as we'd built the Raid array we exited from the software and visited disk administrator to create, and format a drive partition. We then installed Intel's Iometer version 1998.10.01 to see what the card was capable of. We ran workloads to simulate the stress of a file, and web server.

After completion, we found that the file server test gave us 1.57Mbps, and 143.67 transactions per second. The web server gave 1.93Mbps, and 126.69 transactions per second.

As a comparison a similarly specced server running a Mylex Ultra160 card only managed 84.88 transactions per second for the file server, and 82.12 transactions per second for the web.

While some of the results are due to performance gaps between the hard drives used, it still clearly shows that the Adaptec card is capable of high-end performance.

Contact Adaptec (01276) 854 500