Adaptec now a PMC brand has been making an aggressive push back into the market recently. While the Adaptec 3 and 5 series products were extremely popular, the Adaptec 6 series was produced during the acquisition and was received with mixed results. Post acquisition the Adaptec 7 series is receiving lots of market attention as Adaptec bundles features similar to LSI’s software add-ons. After releasing the 7 series RAID controllers, Adaptec is releasing the 7 series host bus adapters or HBA series.
For those wondering, Adaptec also released their 7He series which offers hardware encryption on the HBA. Here are the quick features of both families:
[tabgroup][tab title=”Adaptec 7 Series HBA Quick Specs”]
- Sixteen (71605H, 70165H) and eight (7085H, 7805H) 6Gb/s ports
- PMC PM8018 SAS protocol controller supports SAS and SATA HDDs, SSDs and SAS tape drives
- PCIe Gen 3 x8 host interface
- Low-profile MD2 form factor
- Support for SAS expanders
- Enclosure management support via LED header and SES2/SGPIO
- Up to 800,000 IOPS at 4 KB block size, UP to 1 million IOPS at 512 Byte block size
- Up to 6600 MB/s sequential throughput (64KB blocks)
[/tab][tab title=”Adaptec 7 He Series HBA Quick Specs”]
- Sixteen 6Gb/s ports
- PMC PM8019 SAS protocol controller supports SAS and SATA HDDs, SSDs and SAS tape drives
- PCIe Gen 3 x8 host interface
- Low-profile MD2 form factor
- Support for SAS expanders
- Enclosure management support via LED header and SES2/SGPIO
- Up to 800,000 IOPS at 4 KB block size, UP to 1 million IOPS at 512 Byte block size
- Up to 6600 MB/s sequential throughput (64KB blocks)
[/tab][/tabgroup]
As one can see, Adaptec is offering both 8 port and 16 port HBAs. Adaptec 7H and 7He HBAs use the newer SFF-8643 (internal) and SFF-8644 (external) SAS cabling. These will replace SFF-8087 and SFF-8088 cables respectively with the 12gbps generation of SAS devices. We have already seen one 16 port HBA from LSI with the SFF-8644 cabling in the LSI 9202-16e that we reviewed and benchmarked. Adaptec maintains that using 16 port HBAs allows more effective use of a PCIe 3.0 x8 slot because an 8 port 6.0gbps HBA cannot saturate the PCIe 3.0 interface.
At this point, we can consider the Adaptec 7H and 7He to be paper launched as the official site says April 2013 release. More to come on these.
