Power Consumption And Conclusion
System Power Consumption | Adaptec RAID 51645 | Areca ARC-1680ix-16 | Promise 16650 |
|---|---|---|---|
Power Management enabled | 298 W | 296 W | N/A |
Idle power | 368 W | 365 W | 364 W |
Peak power | 412 W | 409 W | 406 W |
Adaptec and Areca both implement power management, which allows hard drives to spin down after a defined period of idle time. In the case of the Adaptec RAID 51645, power management can be adjusted for each drive or array individually, while there is only a global setting for Areca. In any case, the result is significant. Wwitching on power management and stopping the 16 15,000 RPM hard drives resulted in a system-wide power saving of approximately 70 W, or almost 20%. Check out our test system table for system details.
Conclusion
All three products were designed to deliver maximum storage performance for enterprise environments. Storage arrays, transaction servers, surveillance systems, media processing, and similar applications will all run excellently on any of the three cards. However, we did find some differences.
Feature Winner: Adaptec
Adaptec has the most powerful and the most comfortable management interface, paired with a year-long experience that literally is noticeable when handling the RAID 51645 card and software. The Adaptec Storage Manager has been improved for years, and hence it comes as no surprise that it offers the best solution we tested.
Areca’s Web-based management is simpler, but probably even more efficient, coming with its own network port for management (but without being able to beat Adaptec’s feature set). The email notification and power management settings are not granular enough—I don’t want my system drives to spin down at any time. Promise collects points by being very easy to use and Web-configurable, even for beginners.
Performance
Performance should not be the main factor in your buying decision, as the differences were rather small. Areca hits some limits if your applications tend to create very long command queue depths, but reconsider the Areca card if you need maximum sequential throughput, or high performance on degraded arrays; no one beats Areca in these categories. When it comes to high I/O performance, Adaptec provided the best overall results. Promise keeps itself in the game by offering its product at the lowest price of the three options.
- Hardware,
- 16-port ,
- sas ,
- controller
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what firmware did you test on the areca card? i heard there were some performance issues with earlier firmwares (current is 1.46)
I am disappointed in this review, it does not seem to go into a level of detail sufficient to do justice to this topic.
Firstly most companies these days would build systems using more than 16 drives or 1x4U rackmounted device, and use iSCSI to distribute storage rather than using disks mounted in each server. It's likely that many companies will have several of these using 32,64,128,256 or more drives and also use this storage in parallel to avoid risk of controller or hardware (other than disks) failure.
You neglect to mention that each port on the controller card in supporting upto 4 drives with a fanout cable or more drives through the use of edge and fanout connectors runs in Full Duplex that is to say 4x3Gb/s or 12Gb/s in both directions and of course this will double with the next generation 6Gb/s connections. With conventional SATA/SAS drives peaking at between 100 and 200MB/s it is possible for a single port to support much more than four drives, In practice between 6 and 12 drives transfering data continuously in one direction at full drive speed would be required to use up the full bandwidth of one port. If you allow for the fact that drives are rarely use in this manner and not for sustained periods of time and that the drives may be separated into groups rather than used as a single huge RAID array, it would be possible to actually use between 16 and 64 drives off a single port. This of course might be seen as bad practice if a controller has enough ports to separate the drives into smaller groups but the point is that the controllers are far more versitile and this article does little to inform us of this fact.
You neglect to mention that there is the possibility to acquire Edge and Fanout Expandors as either 3.5" or 5.25" Drive Bay mounted devices or a circuit board which can be installed in both Free Standing Cases or any PC/Server Case to facilitate the use of more drives per port per controller card than would normally be possible with fanout cables.
There are some who would rather build custom/bespoke solutions rather than pay the extra-ordinarily large sums of money that is required for a 16 bay rackmounted storage solution which are often prohibitively expensive.
You also neglect to performance test these controller cards by testing performance to the limits of the controller card when used with multiple edge and fanout expanders.
Please when investigating such topic, do us the service of covering all aspects of the topic properly and in detail so that we might make an informed decision. The controller card is only one part of this solution and the cost of such addons may range from £8,000 to £24,000 per rackmount bay depending on the number of disks supported and the amount/size of disks preinstalled. Perhaps you might offer us examples of these addons with specifications and a Cost per GB! That will certainly put things into perspective!