After reading many posts about RAID controller-MoBo incompatibility issues, I've decided to build my new system around my RAID controller card which is an Adaptec RAID 3805.

1) Does anyone know which motherboards are compatible with this controller? For example is ABIT IP35 Pro compatible?

2) I'll use Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB/750GB and Seagate Cheetah 147GB SAS 15K.5 drives. Are these drives compatible with the Adaptec 3805 controller?

3) Is it ture that most X38 boards have issues with RAID controller cards?

Thank you

If it helps i have a 3805 and it works with P5K-e Wifi from ASUS and i have WD 500gb AAKS drive attached.

http://www.adaptec.com/NR/rdonlyre [...] 5_3085.pdf

Compatibility list as per Adaptec site... lists that the 750gb should be fine... cant see a listing for the Cheetah 147gb but it does list 74gb variants.

Thank you for your reply chookman.

Your MoBo has 2 x PCI-E x16 (blue @ x16 mode, black @ x4 or x1 mode). So does the Adaptec 3805 run at full speed when it's put into the PCI-E x16 (x4 bandwidth) slot?

Are you happy with your Adaptec 3805? Any recommendations specific to this card (I'll have RAID1 using two Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 147GB drives and RAID5 using four/five Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB/750GB drives)? Do I need to disable the onboard SATA ports?

Thank you

The 3805 only has a 4 lane interface anyway... so it will run full speed of card in either slot.

Im very happy with it, i have 5x500gb in RAID5 so ~2Tb partition (i mucked up with partitioning and have to fix that) . Supports everything you could dream of...

The main issue you may run into is the cables for this, youll find there is SAS and SATA fanout cables. Each port supports 4 drives. So you may find you can only use 4 SATA drives as the other fanout cable will have to be SAS to support the Cheetahs. Checkout the cable accesories page to verify cables with hdd interfaces.

http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/produ [...] ables/sas/

I've recently noticed the port problem. Sad, but I'll live with it for the sake of the performance Cheetahs will bring. I think 2.7TB will be enough for the next 3-4 years.

I've contacted both Adaptec and Abit. They both told me to check their compatibility lists which do not include many devices. I guess I'll just take my chances. If it doesn't work, I'll simply return it.

But I'm still wondering if anyone else is using 3805...

Thank you

I run this card with ASUS p5e3 deluxe and vista 64bit. The system is set up as a media server. In general it works fine. I have 2 problems with the card which may or may not worry you.

1) It does not work with vista hibernate. Which either wastes power or causes lengthy delays.

2) It has a limitation of 4 logical arrays per physical disk drive. This limits logical drive size in vista to 8 TB. Adaptec thought that this was not a real world problem. However with the drive being used to store media which is written once and therefore not needing re-organisation, and physical disks getting larger by the day, this limitation will cause sretup complications and needless expense.

Does anyone know of a controller that does not have these limitations?