Brent’s Thoughts

Geek 07 Sep 2005 09:27 am

Adaptec 1420SA is JUNK!

Comments (118)

118 Responses to “Adaptec 1420SA is JUNK!”

	on 19 Apr 2006 at 10:21 am 1. luKas' bl♥ggie☺☺ (©) - by luKas said … My bookmarks2005 regex studio visualAJAX Magazine~/.fluxbox/keys.htmlAjaxian » A Wordpress Ajax ShoutboxBrent’s Thoughts » Adaptec 1420SA is JUNK!
	on 12 Jan 2006 at 5:20 pm 2. melnikov.net.ru said … На одном блоге (brentNorris.net) народ обсуждает некую железку (RAID-контроллер Adaptec 1420SA), клянет вендора за отсутствие поддержки в Линукс.. В общем, жалобно стонет.
	on 07 Sep 2005 at 2:11 pm 3. noneofus said … Is this lack of support caused by the open source community not using copyrighted function code within their operating systems?
	on 07 Sep 2005 at 2:41 pm 4. Brent said … No that lack of support is because Adaptec is too lazy. They are compiling for a specific kernel version, but their code probably requires little change for other versions, but because their code is closed source and they are the only ones that can compile it, it is only available for the versions they compile it for. Which are really limited. Make no mistake if they were to install a FC4 box and put their code on it, I bet it would take less than an hour to get their code to compile. The kernel versions are only two minor versions apart and thus there are little to no API changes in them.
	on 20 Sep 2005 at 2:26 pm 5. maxx said … I’ve had this EXACT problem with National Instruments. Our engineering group uses these PCI GPIB cards made by them, and they -only- have kernel modules for EL3. You recall me trying to get it to work with CentOS and WhiteBox. Amusingly, our email responses from NI looked identical to the ones you posted above. Why do I get the feeling that these messages are all originating from some outsourced tech response company in Bangalore?! So yeah… Adaptec AND National Instruments SUCK! C’mon Google! Index this.
	on 20 Sep 2005 at 2:45 pm 6. Brent said … heheheh I so read that last part as, “Hey Google…. INDEX THIS!!!” with a crotch grab at the end. I had stop laughing for a minute to realize what you were really saying.
	on 20 Sep 2005 at 4:53 pm 7. maxx said … Hey, I like your version better! I wish I had thought of it myself!
	on 23 Sep 2005 at 12:55 pm 8. Brent’s Thoughts » Hey Google, Index THIS!!! said … [...] After I got an email from someone in Germany talking about my post about Adaptec’s Junk Ass 1420SA, I got interested in how he got to me. Looking through the logs it looks like I have gotten a few hits from “Fedora Adaptec 1420SA“. So I went to google and did a search for it. [...]
	on 25 Sep 2005 at 6:43 am 9. Jeroen said … i got the same problem, i also bought one of those crapy card and can’t get it to work in my gentoo linux , the card seems to have a marvell chip, but i have mailed them to and they aren’t willing to proivde any driver or support either Greets Jeroen
	on 08 Oct 2005 at 10:37 am 10. carl said … have a look at this: http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/9/3/94
	on 14 Oct 2005 at 11:31 am 11. Unamed said … Well its been indexed , i was just wondering what the hell was wrong with this on board raid card. at least i didnt waste days find out … i will not bother using the raid option
	on 09 Dec 2005 at 8:24 am 12. Brent said … This article just keeps getting picked up. http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html#adaptec-1420sa First time I have heard it called scathing.
	on 03 Jan 2006 at 8:51 am 13. Mike said … There is “Highly Experimental” non proprietary support for Linux in the kernel-2.6.15-rc5. I just got it running, we’ll see how stable it is. If it is stable than this could be considered a budget PCI-X 4-port SATA card. There are also proprietary drivers for this card. You may want to have a look at these links: http://www.edoceo.com/liber/marvell-sata.php http://www.keffective.com/mvsata/FC3 http://www.linuxaa.com/ftopic11962.html
	on 03 Jan 2006 at 9:10 am 14. Brent said … This is all good stuff and I am glad that everyone is posting here. I knew that eventually the card would be supported in Linux. The point of this more than anything though is that this card is marketed as a RAID card, and it isn’t even close. Adaptec talks like they have Linux support, but they don’t and when you ask them for it they tell you to spend more money on a worse card that doesn’t do what you want. I think it is great that the Linux community is working around this lackluster support, but it is bad that a company can lie about things so much and still sell stuff.
	on 04 Jan 2006 at 7:41 am 15. Ben said … I should defenitivly read this before buying it . Thanks to Brent for this article, and to Mike for the links, I ll give a try to the vanilla-2.6.15.
	on 11 Jan 2006 at 6:39 pm 16. glenn said … damn!damn! why do I find these kind of articles only after I bought the controller? on 2 identical systems ( one with the controller, one without) the raid enabled disk performance is about 10 slower than the non-raid! Whereupon I became uneasy. So I searched on “adaptec 1420sa slow”, this site came up. some expletives followed ! What’s the use of this card, as the os can do the same! and this HOSTRaid stuff, the same BS as Microsoft invented with hostbased printers. Once again it’s proven: trust someone and they’ll cheat you. Brent, Could you not get a hyperlink on the adaptec page to warn off the next sucker like me? Somebody need a new 1420sa card?
	on 11 Jan 2006 at 6:57 pm 17. Brent said … Sorry man. I wish there was something more I can do. I have posted the info that I have. I guess if I could get more people to link to this it would crawl its way up in the google rank. I think it is pretty dumb that Adaptec can get away with stuff like this and I would be interested in causing them some fiscal damage for it if there was some way to do that. Is there any chance that you could return the card? If you can make sure to tell them the reason. Also anyone who might read this and have it affect your buying choice, please post a quick comment. With the hits that I get for searches like “Adaptec 1420SA Linux” and stuff like that, Adaptec has to at least of ran across this page before. If they start to see a big long list of people who aren’t buying their junk because of it, maybe they will change their plans.
	on 12 Jan 2006 at 5:16 am 18. Alex Chejlyk said … I was also duped into thinking the 1420sa was a true hardware raid card. It honestly should be marketed as an expensive sata controller, not an affordable sata raid controller. I usually use 3ware sata 8006-2 controllers as they are supported by all modern linux distro’s and cost about the same as the 1420sa/1410sa, unfortunately Monarch computer only offered adaptec cards with this particular server series. This will be the last Adaptec card I purchase, as of now, 3ware has 100% of my raid adapter business.
	on 31 Jan 2006 at 4:05 am 19. stratos said … I also recently bought such a card and had excacly the same troubles. (they support rh enterprise 4 oh that means they will prolly support fedora core 4 also) however while snooping around i found this page http://tinyurl.com/yjkq77 which has the interesting wording: “There may be additional files included for some operating systems that are not officially supported such as United Linux, CENTOS and Fedora Core. These are provided for your convenience.” i’m now downloading the file, so i’m not sure if fedora core drivers are on it. but as they say, there “MAY” be drivers yet.
	on 26 Feb 2006 at 9:49 pm 20. Matt said … Thanks for posting this info. I nearly brought one but will look for something better now.
	on 27 Mar 2006 at 5:35 pm 21. Rich said … Hi guys, Just thought you might like to know, the latest release of the 2.6 kernel 2.6.16 works great with this card. Have just got FC4 up and running after messing around with older kernels for ages! I too bought the card before reading this 2.6.15 worked but hung when the drives were connected. Go on upgrade ya kernels and enjoy sata speed Rich
	on 07 Apr 2006 at 3:48 am 22. Marc said … Nice, but Itried and it didn’t work. How did you made it work?
	on 12 Apr 2006 at 8:41 am 23. Phil said … I’ve been mucking around with this for hours trying to get it to install in a Debian Sarge system. I found the source on the Adaptec website – I can’t for the life of me get it to compile. It seems that there are build dependencies that point to SuSE config info. Now I have to figure out how to return the damn thing to buy.com.
	on 15 Apr 2006 at 5:54 pm 24. sai said … has anyone been successful with doing hot-plugging with this card ?? i am also greatly dissapointed that adaptec made such a crap…hopefully at least hot-plug works ??
	on 17 Apr 2006 at 5:18 am 25. Brent said … Sai, sorry I can’t answer this for you or any of the other questions that are in this thread. The one and only card that I have is in production on a Windows machine now and I can’t test anything on it. Hopefully, so of the other people in this thread will be able to help or there will be some more drive by posters that might be able to. I also wanted to thank everyone for posting something here. I hope that other people that are finding this thread are getting something out of it that might help them with this POS card that adaptec put out. The sad thing is that I am sure Adaptec doesn’t even care as they have already bilked the customers with this card and are moving on to make a newer junk card that they will try to get people to buy by conning them into thinking it has features it doesn’t. That seems to be the way companies work now days. Make a product. Sort of support it for a couple months and then move on to something else, leaving the customers to fend for their own.
	on 17 Apr 2006 at 9:12 am 26. sai said … oh well… i hope someone else can help me on this issue ? It’s just a minute or 2 to check if hot-plug works or not regards
	on 17 Apr 2006 at 11:39 pm 27. luKas said … Okay, a very sh!t RAID card. I spent two days with finding drivers for Red hat Enterprise 3 to set up hard raid. I don’t know this is a fake raid card. So ….thnks for all !
	on 22 May 2006 at 12:45 pm 28. Derrich said … Doing some research on getting a fake RAID controller working under FC4, and I stumbled across this link. It’s not just Adaptec, man. A lot of companies are going this route. The sad part is when a (non-technical) purchasing person sees a RAID card for $50, they think they’ve found the buy of the century. And good luck trying to convince them otherwise. “It *SAYS* RAID, doesn’t it?!” *shudder*
	on 12 Jun 2006 at 2:21 pm 29. andrew said … Expecting the 1420sa to be as cheap as it is while still providing hardware RAID is not unreasonable since it’s RAID 0/1, not 5. There is no parity calculation/engine required so they should be able to make it this cheap, right? I’m running 2.6.16-1.2122_FC5 and when the machine starts up it still sees the component drives instead of the mirrored array. I thought 2.6.16 was supposed to have this fixed?
	on 12 Jun 2006 at 2:33 pm 30. Brent said … I haven’t been able to try. My card is in a Windows machine and I refuse to buy another one of these. I guess if Adaptec sends me one, maybe I will take the time to see if it works. Other than that, this page stands as my desire to see adaptec lose sales on this card.
	on 06 Jul 2006 at 3:09 pm 31. James said … Bought one of these for a home Linux server..big mistake. Regular freezes and hangs, eventually after 5 rebuilds I tracked the problem down to this card. Bit the bullit and spend the extra to buy a 3ware controller, what a differnce. My advice …avoid the 1420SA like the plague.
	on 12 Jul 2006 at 1:38 am 32. Gerrit said … Not only Adaptec is guilty of this deceptive marketing, our company recently bought several IBM x346 servers which contain IBM ServeRAID (7e). Having good experience with IBM’s “ips” driver which is built into many distro’s it seemed like a good idea since we only needed RAID1. Turns out ServeRAID is the same as Adaptec HostRAID… proprietary driver “a320raid”. This system is SLES9-certified and IBM and Novell-supported so I took advantage of this when a kernel update caused the machine not to boot (since the driver is shipped separately). It seems the policy is that driver-updates will be shipped for “Service Pack” releases but not for security-update kernels. Basically if you’re using this machine in a secure environment you better not use the onboard RAID since you won’t be able to upgrade your kernel. And this system is bloody certified!! The fakeraid marketing as hardware RAID must stop, and certification of these machines should be dependent on either real open source drivers, or real driver support for *every* vendor kernel. Why else do we pay a premium for enterprise distributions? We may as well install Ubuntu or OpenSUSE and spend the saved money in a decent hardware RAID card! It is high time something was done about this…
	on 12 Jul 2006 at 1:54 am 33. urbanite.be [version 4.2] said … Software RAID marketed as Hardware RAID…… http://www.brentnorris.net/blog/wp-trackback.php?p=158 Not only Adaptec is guilty of this deceptive marketing, our company recently bought several IBM x346 servers which contain IBM ServeRAID (7e). Having good experience with IBM’s “ips” driver w…
	on 19 Jul 2006 at 2:21 am 34. mmj said … “Fake raid” such as this is common and is normal for controllers in this price range. Some of the functionality that would be handled by hardware in much more expensive systems is handled by the driver instead. This allows for cards supporting RAID to be made cheap enough for consumers. Unfortunately the cards usually do not support some features of RAID such as hot swapping or a battery backup for the cache in terms of power failure. However this is a decent tradeoff for the ultra low price – hardware RAID controllers are rare in the consumer world and start at around four times the price (as far as I can tell). At the moment (since this blog post I presume), Adaptec not only provide binary RPM drivers for various kernels but they also provide a source code package which can be compiled into different (and future) kernels. The source code driver package links together source code with binary object files. This allows you at least to recompile your kernel and have the driver compiled into the new kernel. I purchased the 1420SA after using a SIL3112a based controller, another driver-based (fake raid) controller, which I was having problems with. You should always check the supported operating systems list when buying any hardware.
	on 19 Jul 2006 at 10:17 am 35. Brent said … Again it all comes back to the point that Adaptec does its best to act like this is actually some sort of hardware RAID and it just isn’t. There is very little difference between using this “Driver” based approach and just doing it inside Windows or Linux. All that work so that Adaptec can make a few extra bucks and shaft their consumers.
	on 19 Jul 2006 at 9:11 pm 36. mmj said … I checked the box it came in and it said “HostRAID” on the box and doesn’t appear to claim to be hardware raid anywhere. Perhaps other companies marketing it have been marketing it wrongly but nowhere on the actual box or in the manual did I get the wrong impression. Also, after doing quite a bit of research it appears that the price alone is enough to prove it’s not hardware raid – this card is around $100 whereas Adaptec’s non-hostraid cards seems to start at $500 (australian). If adaptec is ripping off their customers it’s by making their hardware raid solutions so expensive. Making a more affordable hostraid based alternative is not where they are ripping off customers in my opinion.
	on 20 Jul 2006 at 6:16 am 37. Brent said … And I am sure right under where it says HostRAID on the box, it says “This isn’t really a RAID card. Actually you aren’t getting anything better than what you would be getting if you just use your OS’s Software RAID. Come on. This card is a way to get people to spend money on something that really doesn’t provide anything.
	on 27 Jul 2006 at 12:49 pm 38. Brian said … I got this card so I could dual boot Windows and Linux on the same raid 1 array. Gotcha in Windows was to install the driver without the drives attached first (using the onboard sata). Linux (Centos 4.3) installed fine after using the “OpenBuild” method of creating a driver disk (kernel 2.6.9-34.EL). The perf was poor until I enabled the write cache on the card. This boosted write performance by a factor of 9 in Linux (50MB/s) and 5 in Windows (30MB/s). Not bad. I was getting ready to abandon this plan… I apologize for running Windows, but I use it for video editing and some gaming.
	on 17 Sep 2006 at 8:40 am 39. Lyndell said … Helpful article. I wonder if I should not consider the $50 Adaptec Serial ATA PCI Controller Model: ASH-1205 at BestBuy ( http://tinyurl.com/yj9s4j ) and consider a cheaper Compusa ( http://tinyurl.com/ybprlr )or Belkin brand. I’m not considering RAID since it’s more than I want to pay in daughter cards or drives; just want SATA for forward compatibility.
	on 26 Sep 2006 at 12:45 pm 40. Brian said … OK scrap this adapter! Filesystem corruption city. I’ve gone with software raid 1 and 4 drives, two for Windows and 2 for Linux.
	on 09 Oct 2006 at 7:35 am 41. Eric said … What’s up with that “SHIM” source package? What a pile of shit.
	on 18 Oct 2006 at 9:55 am 42. John said … My mobo’s “fakeraid” is not supported by Linux, so I am in the market for a hardware raid card. I am very glad I found this page. Not only will I not buy this card, but I will also not buy any other card from Adaptec, seeing as how their customer service is so bad.
	on 19 Oct 2006 at 4:03 am 43. Eric said … I have an Acer Altos R310 machine delivered with the Adaptec ICH HostRaid SATA adapter. I tried for days to get SuSE 10.1 to see the Raid 1 I set up using the Adaptec utility, but the OS always showed two independent disks. I tried some hints I found on the web like brokenmodules=ach_piix as a boot parameter, but it made no difference. To make things worse in the startup screens and in the Adaptec utility nowhere is it written the Adaptec card model mumber. Fortunately I found your site and discovered that the Adaptec card is a piece of shit and apparently so is Adaptec. In the BIOS I switched off the “Raid” and left it as a normal SATA controller. I then set up a soft raid using the SuSE 10.1 OS since at least I can use the OS tools. I also will never order an Adaptec card. Being cheated is not the same as customer support. Google : Find this! HostRAID SuSE single disks driver download configure troubleshooting Adaptec linux
	on 13 Nov 2006 at 2:12 pm 44. Brent’s Thoughts » I’m number two, I’m number two said … [...] On a lark, I did a search for “Adaptec 1420sa” the other day and was surprised when I found that my post on the Adaptec 1420sa is the number two hit right under Adaptec’s own site. [...]
	on 14 Nov 2006 at 9:44 am 45. mega said … Hi, there are not only problems with the Linux drivers. I have Windows 2003 Server 64-bit on M/B MSI K8D Master3-133 with 2x AMD Opteron 270 CPUs. I’m fighting two days with low speed of the Adaptec 1420SA. I was finding why S-ATA RAID on the motherboard (Silicon Image 3114) is too much faster than Adaptec 1420SA (PCI-X 133) in real-life performance. Even RAID1 on SIL was faster than RAID10 on 1420SA! I was trying different HDDs, latest BIOS for Adaptec, jumpers on the mobo … always same poor performance. Now it’s pretty clear, i think. Shit from Adaptec… Thanks for Brent!
	on 14 Nov 2006 at 12:57 pm 46. acwchangs said … when i found problem installing the 1420SA,(blue screen) I read the documentation and found they didn’t provide any troubleshooting page(even information) they assume that we will have no problem after paying money for their card and no problem for them too.
	on 28 Nov 2006 at 11:28 am 47. larice2000 said … Thanks! I was about to buy this card because i was not able to retrieve another XFX revo64 that is working with raid 1 under ubuntu sarge and dapper not very fast but without problems and with reasonable speed.
	on 01 Dec 2006 at 4:51 pm 48. Eric M said … I have two file servers running with the 1420sa card. Both are raid 1 bootable arrays. The two machines are now 4 months old and the only problem that I have encountered so far is that one of the sata ports was bad, causing a drive to fall out of the array. Once I changed to a different port the system became stable. During this process I contacted Adaptec support and found them to be very helpful. I must say that I was also duped by the “host raid” thinking I was getting a hardware based solution. Performance on these cards seems to be good. I have a 3Ware 9550sx raid five setup with 4 drives. The two drive 1420sa raid 1 array routinely outperforms my 3Ware setup on large file reads. Files that are 100 megs or more. The 3Ware setup does seem to have better seek time and smaller file reads. If I would have known this before building this machine I would have setup the 3Ware card in raid 1. Our company does alot of large Photoshop and Indesign files, some of them reaching 600megs which are stored on the 3Ware setup. I have spoken and optimized the 3Ware card with 3Ware tech support. This is also the second 3Ware card, the first one failed last week and has been RMA’ed.If in fact hardware raid is the most optimal for performance, then I am not seeing it on my machines. I am also concerned about my 1420sa’s reliability in the case of a card failure. When my 3Ware card died, all I had to do was replace it with a new card and everything worked fine. Will this be the same with the 1420sa in the event if a card failure?
	on 01 Dec 2006 at 9:51 pm 49. Brent said … Good luck. I wouldn’t stake my data on it. Personally.
	on 12 Jan 2007 at 12:36 pm 50. Eric said … Once again I am trying to compile drivers using the SHIM package. Once again it doesn’t work whatsoever.
	on 16 Jan 2007 at 9:18 am 51. mafro said … A cursory search on google before buying a RAID controller brought this page up – I had guessed already that Adaptec were lying about the “hardware” RAID, when the next product up costs almost 3 times the price. Definitely will not be buying one of these Adaptec! On a related point, since the HostRAID balls is done by the CPU, could one essentially use a faster processor in the server to counter-act the RAID load? If I build a NAS for my home office, I was gonna use an old Athlon box I have sitting around. Perhaps it would be worth buying a Sempron 3000 mobo bundle for around the £100 mark..
	on 16 Jan 2007 at 1:17 pm 52. Brent said … I would think that you would just go ahead and use Software RAID and forget anything about “HostRAID”. I would trust the Linux kernel with my RAID data more than I would trust Adaptec and this card.
	on 16 Jan 2007 at 9:42 pm 53. norm said … I wonder how many who posted have called Adaptec support to ask if a HostRAID card will work in system X? Low end RAID cards are just that, low end. “4 Serial ATA 3Gb/s ports, PCI-X 133 MHz, low-profile form factor with Native Command Queuing, RAID 0, 1, and 10 for desktops, workstations and entry-level servers” From: http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/products/sata_prod/sata2raid/AAR-1420SA/ Does Linux let you boot from the software RAID array? (That is the difference between OS software RAID vs HostRAID, HostRAID has a BIOS.)
	on 17 Jan 2007 at 6:49 am 54. Brent said … It won’t very well boot from it if Linux doesn’t understand the crapRAID and therefore just sees the drives as individual drives. Also the newest version of grub will let you boot from RAID I believe. You can see my conversation with them at the top. I would also say that again the line you quote is misleading, since the card really doesn’t “do” RAID at all. The OS does.
	on 18 Jan 2007 at 3:38 pm 55. SteveP said … Hi Brent, Sorry to hear your support issue. I just bought one of these as a substitute to buying a new MB with a second controller chip. My kids 74gb raptor filled so quickly that I had to buy a bunch of cheaper 250gbs and thought four was a good price and forgot I got the cheapest a8n-sli w/o a second controller. The Adaptec 1420SA showed up to be the best price four-port controller to support my want for 0+1. I configured 4×250’s in “10″ and I have a few thoughts on it after a bit of use: 1) Performance on std PCI interface is FAST. Faster in Raid10 than my 10K Raptor. This is likely due to that Raptors are SATA-1 and the new driveset is all SATA-II with huge buffers. Great performance for the dollar. 2) I recently tested, by accident, a 1420sa disk hardware failure when I left a SATA cable on one drive disconnected, and this essentially WORKED as a hardware raid solution by rebuilding the entire array, as part of the boot/BIOS update process. It may have needed the O/S to confirm this but that was “transparent” entirely. If the “host” did anything, it just changed by BIOS boot message from performing at “Degraded” level back to “Optimal” one time when I rebooted for some other reason. There is a LOT more than the normal “lifting” of load by this card than a non-hardware, software-only RAID solution. (Excepting a lot of raid-5′ers out there who really are gluttons for punishment). 3) If you want a cheap hardware PCI/ATA solution, I have used the AMI MegaRAID chipset for over 8 1/2 years, using multiple implementations with a replacement CARD, and found that to be a real value. Worked great. I think it even had raid-5 but can’t recall and never used it other than raid-0 (hw only) and raid-1 (hw only). I think they got bought by LSI but if you can find one of these cards, give one a try. (Note, Fdisking can be tricky depending on what version you use, you may have to do some bit-changing arithmetic.) Best of Luck! Steve
	on 19 Jan 2007 at 3:58 pm 56. reidfo said … Just… DAMN. I JUST bought this card today, and my shiny new Linux box is installing right now with it (under FC6). I’m glad I found this site. I bought Adaptec because I *thought* I was buying a quality hardware raid card. Fortunately my distributor has a 10 day return policy. This sucker’s going back first thing Monday morning and I’m buying a 3ware controller.
	on 17 Feb 2007 at 2:14 pm 57. LarryInCincy said … I am not sure where it document stuff like this but this blog seems as good a place as any. I too bought a bright and shiny new 1420SA raid card thinking I might want raid on my new backup server. I choose Adaptec because I have had great luck with the other 4 – upscale 2XXX models – I bought for my Beowulf clusters and webservers. Lost a lot of disks over the years but the controller just beeped a bunch till I hot swapped a replacement drive in – rebuilt on the fly with out even a reboot! Life was good. So the 1420 seemed like a safe bet – still might be but the installs not done yet so I can’t say for sure – but, my God, what I had to go through to get here. 1st comment: Why does Adaptec send out their drivers in a *.img file? — Rpms don’t count if you are trying to install. — What’s in the img file? A handful of files in a dos disk format. How do you get them to a dos disk? Go to a linux box and run “dd if=driver_name.img of=/dev/fd0″. This will put 700K of driver files down on a dos disk. If you don’t happen to have a linux box handy this will be tough and you can’t simply copy the img to a floppy because its too big and it wouldn’t work anyway. If they are sending out dos files( OK, linux files but packaged in a DOS disk format) why not in a *.exe format that writes dos disks? 2nd comment: This is for Red Hat. Red Hat is VERY particular about revisions – I mean down to the “-##” kernel number – 2.6.9 wasn’t good enough. I spent a day – including 2 calls to Adaptec support – not much help but they aren’t linux folks after all – trying to figure out why the latest Adaptec drivers wouldn’t load. BTW. Red Hat isn’t kind enough to say, “You are trying to install a driver from a kernel version different then you are installing to. Do you want to continue?”. It doesn’t say anything at all just doesn’t find any drives. My fix: Got the scoop on Red Hat img stuff here. http://www.cpqlinux.com/dig-bootnet.html I unpacked the modules.cgz file – who knew it is a gzipped cpio archive – renamed the kernel driver directories from 2.6.9-42.ELsmp to 2.6.9-22.ELsmp and re-cpio and gzipped back to modules.cgz and wrote the 5 files out to a dos disk. BTW. the -H crc switch to cpio is critical. The cpio routine in the Red Hat install complains about a “bad magic number” if you don’t use it. Hope this helps somebody.
	on 18 Feb 2007 at 1:19 am 58. JarFil said … Hey, great! I was just considering buying one of these, and you made me decide against it. Beware the power of free speech, they’ve got yet another customer less
	on 23 Feb 2007 at 8:17 am 59. mike dentifrice said … Hi there, I’m about to buy SATA II controlers for building a software RAID array of 8 disks (using RAID6). I’ve read the above comments about how this card sucks in terms of hardware RAID capabilities and dodgy software support, but since it seems to be one of the only affortable SATA II controlers out there, and I’m not planning to use its so-called RAID features, I’m really looking forward to hearing about it in that regard. So – what do you guys have to say regarding its basic SATA II functionality under GNU/Linux (I’ll be using in on a Debian Etch server)? Is it running steadily (I’ve been having some trouble with the somehow weak Promise UltraTX2 ATA133 controlers in the past)? Feedback would be greatly appreciated, and if you have suggestions of a better & cheaper SATA II controler, please shoot! Thanks,
	on 26 Feb 2007 at 6:44 am 60. Karl said … I just brought one of these too, i was also duped. Considering keeping it and just using it as a plain sata controller, or possibly exchanging for a 3ware 9550sx. it does actually get recognised under gentoo and can see the drives attached…just doesnt do the raid (as said above). I also will not be buying adaptec again after reading this article..
	on 01 Mar 2007 at 4:52 am 61. Mark said … I have tried using this card in a Windows SBS environment – the performance using ‘compatible drives’ and a ‘compatible mainboard’ according to Adpatec’s site is woeful. I am using 400 GB Seagate Sata II Drives in 300mb/sec mode – the software won’t auto rebuild until you reboot -it just sits on 0% rebuilding. Does anyone have adaptec’s email address I would love to send them a letter on how shit this card really is. I have never had a problem with ANY of the cheap promise alternatives. I purchased this for a customer as there were no promise equivalents available in australia….. never again – the customers can wait or go elsewhere… now I look like an idiot for providing a product that won’t do what they claim it to be able to.
	on 02 Mar 2007 at 10:16 am 62. Tesh said … Your message to: serviceregistration@adaptec.com was blocked by our Spam Firewall. The email you sent with the following subject has NOT BEEN DELIVERED: Subject: Adaptec Serial ATA II RAID 1420SA Vista support hmmm, maybe i’ll give this a miss too… Cheers Brent.
	on 10 Mar 2007 at 2:43 pm 63. Tom Hummel, Norway said … To Brent and potential cheap Adaptec and IBM-server customers: Seems like there are similarities with the SATA-raid in IBM server x-206 called “serveraid 7e” with support for 2 sata disks. It is in fact a built-in Adaptec card, but hardly a “controller”. I got suspicious when I couldn’t find any cloning facility in the BIOS. One disk where in trouble and the server simply hang when reaching the bad disk’s weak spot when trying to rebuild it. This happened over and over again and the server had to be turned off by powering off, but the status at preboot-time was telling “OK” for both disks mirrored in raid-1. This was simply a untrue message. IDE disks can stop the server like this, SCSI disks can’t as far as I know. The Windows server 2003 were rebuilding the disk (and showing this in the Serveraid manager-program, not the serveraid-card itself which is built in the motherboard. You can alter the priority for the rebuilding process by right-clicking the disk in the program, but the Windows server would stop any how and not give any on-line message of what is going wrong. Because of the frenetic disk-activity you would think there is some computer-virus eating your data. Let this be a warning for IBM customers believing they will get a true RAID with IBM x-206. Google look here: IBM SERVERAID 7e I’m thankful for this site, reminding everybody : If you buy cheap, you’ll get cheap. But these cards cost more than many motherboards….
	on 12 Mar 2007 at 4:24 am 64. max sturm said … Thanks for your article..but to late for me !
	on 12 Mar 2007 at 6:26 pm 65. Tom Hummel, Norway said … Unfortunately some essential on-screen-information about rebuilding without any operating system were out-of-sight. It is in fact possible to rebuild a new one disk in mirror with the controller itself and without entering the operating system. Here follows two important answers from Adaptec: 1. Hostbased raid 2. Linux and Adaptec raid card. How to make storage manager for Linux see the Adaptec controller. 1. This is Adaptec’s own answer about “hostbased raid” at their tecnical web-pages: (the link is too long so I leave the text here). Question What does HostRAID mean? What features are offered by HostRAID? This information applies to the following Product(s): - Adaptec SCSI Card 29320A-R - Adaptec SCSI Card 29320ALP-R - Adaptec SCSI Card 39320A-R - Adaptec SCSI Card 29320-R - Adaptec SCSI Card 29320LP-R - Adaptec SCSI Card 39320-R - Adaptec SCSI Card 39320D-R - Adaptec Serial ATA Raid 1210SA - Adaptec Serial ATA Raid 1420SA - Adaptec Serial Attached SCSI 44300 - Adaptec Serial Attached SCSI 48300 - Adaptec Serial Attached SCSI 58300 This information applies to the following Operating System(s): - This information is not Operating System specific Answer HostRAID is an integrated RAID technology that adds entry level RAID support. It is also called intelligent RAID on chip (iROC) or software RAID and it is built into the firmware of the controller. There is no additional RAID processor on HostRAID cards. With the above listed SAS and SATA HostRAID controllers, HostRAID is always enabled by default. There are only HostRAID drivers available, regardless if the drives are configured as RAID or if they are being used in JBOD mode. With the above mentioned Ultra320 SCSI controller cards, this feature needs to be enabled in the BIOS. By default HostRAID is disabled. Please keep in mind there are different driver files necessary dependent on the HostRAID setting. If HostRAID is disabled, the SCSI driver needs to be installed. If HostRAID is enabled, the HostRAID driver needs to be installed. Please see the User’s Guide for further details on how to enable or disable HostRAID and on how to migrate SCSI to HostRAID or vice versa. Answer ID 8986 shows the maximum number of drives allowed for RAID 0, 1 and 10 in a HostRAID configuration. HostRAID offers the following features: - Bootable array support - Global Spares (minimum 1 spare, maximum 2 spares) - Complete RAID configuration and management utility in the BIOS - Provides graphical RAID management software - Supports Hot Swap of drives - Support for Auto Rebuild (if there is a spare) - Support for Auto Verify *********************************************************** 2: Storage Manager for Linux does not see Card or RAID Array on a Linux System Question : Storage Manager for Linux will not see the controller card or the RAID array on a Linux system, even if the services have been verfied running or have been manually restarted. This affects the following RAID Controller Cards: - Adaptec SCSI RAID 2120S - Adaptec SCSI RAID 2130SLP - Adaptec SCSI RAID 2200S - Adaptec SCSI RAID 2230SLP - Adaptec SATA RAID 2410SA - Adaptec SATA RAID 2410SA Enclosure Kit - Adaptec SATA RAID 2810SA - Adaptec SATA RAID 21610SA Operating Systems Affected: - This issue affects all supported distributions of LINUX including Red Hat and SuSE using the embedded [aacraid] kernel module. Answer This condition occurs when one is using the embedded [aacraid] kernel module for the driver instead of the module from Adaptec. One should go to Adaptec’s website and download either the drivers for the Linux version they are using or use the DKMS packages to incorporate Adaptec’s driver source code and build a driver for that Linux version. Operating System This issue does not pertain to any specific Linux Distribution
	on 16 Mar 2007 at 6:32 pm 66. Rowan said … I also came across this card and did a quick Google for “1420SA review.” Glad I found this page. I had assumed that because the cost was about 3-4 times that of a cheapie SiL card, it was more likely to be hardware based. Obviously I was wrong! I am currently using a motherboard with an embedded Intel controller. It works well in a RAID10 configuration but is extremely unreliable in RAID5 – it keeps reporting that drives fail, strangely enough they are perfect when I switch to RAID10! If another drive “fails” while you’re rebuilding the RAID5 array from the first “failure” then your data is toast. Anyway, one of the issues with the software based controller is that there’s little diagnostic ability if something other than complete hardware failure happens. Right now my comp plays up on a particular file: I can hear the HD clicking away, and then the machine freezes or reboots. I cannot back up my system because of this. I presume it’s a low level problem with a member HD but the RAID software cannot seem to handle this, nor does it offer any way to diagnose it. This turned into a bit of a rant about Intel’s solution, but there are probably the same issues for most software RAID based controllers. On that note: has Windows implemented software based RAID yet? If not then the time seems about right for Mickeysoft to take over this portion of the market (again)
	on 21 Mar 2007 at 9:19 am 67. Adaptec 1420SA Img - linux-noob.com/forums said … [...] their particular O/S. Thank you for contacting Adaptec Technical Supportand theres much more to readhttp://www.brentnorris.net/blog/?p=158cheersanyweb ——————– anywebforums, tips, news, reviews and stuff [...]
	on 22 Mar 2007 at 10:43 am 68. View topic - How to add driver during install 2006? and other complaints! - Mandriva Club Forum said … [...] Perhaps there’s a good reason why Adaptec doesn’t want us to see their source. EDIT: Oh, and here’s a link you’re sure to enjoy. _________________Club helper, crusader and house-trained primate. [...]
	on 02 Apr 2007 at 12:36 am 69. Adaptec 1420SA suse 10.1 driver - Web - WebCrawler said … [...] 1000’s of Stores. Sponsored by: http://www.Shopping.com/printers [Found on Ads by Yahoo!] 2. Brent’s Thoughts » Adaptec 1420SA is JUNK! Turns out ServeRAID is the same as Adaptec HostRAID proprietary driver … I tried for days to [...]
	on 07 Apr 2007 at 4:29 pm 70. Roberto B. said … After we bought two ibm 206m that runs 2003 std with SAS drives (the 1st) and XP Pro with SATA drives (the 2nd), we noticed that MS-SQL performance are about 1/5 of our notebook with 4200 rpm drive. Not bad for a workgroup DB server ! Now we are in difficult because it’s hard to migrate from hostraid config to single drive. They never imagine the amount of time we loss for a cheap controller that only have the name of raid system. Thank you to your site that gave me the confirmation of this.
	on 13 Apr 2007 at 12:27 pm 71. Scott Passe said … Hi All, At the risk of going counter to the flow, this is just simple economics. Controllers at this price point can’t afford to have an onboard I/O processor. Cards that have an onboard CPU (for example an Intel 80302) like the Adaptec 2410 are at the $400.00 (MSRP) price point. Not that I am a particular fan of these low priced cards, I am having an ongoing battle with Promise’s version of a “Host RAID” solution… This is just a classic example of “you get what you pay for” So if you want “real” hardware based RAID, you have to shell out $300-$400 for it. Actually the 2410SA can be had for as little as $250.00 And yes, software based RAID is still RAID, so IMO, they can call it RAID. Regards
	on 15 Apr 2007 at 12:25 pm 72. Adaptec 1420SA RAID and HD faillure - 2CPU.com Discussion Forums said … [...] : http://www.brentnorris.net/blog/?p=158 Damnit…i’m sure that’s where the problem lies. this raid, sorry, softraid card seems to **** up [...]
	on 05 May 2007 at 3:04 am 73. [Raid 1 controller] Advies controller nodig - Opslagmedia & I/O Controllers - GoT - Powered by React said … [...] hetzelfde als "hardware based", dus ja. Hier een grappige rant over Adaptec HostRAID: http://www.brentnorris.net/blog/?p=158 messageidsmessageids.length=‘26401494′,’102621′] Geplaatst op donderdag 31 augustus 2006 [...]
	on 14 May 2007 at 8:14 pm 74. d said … how can you call it a software raid when you can run i.e. MS-DOS for it. It installs a hidden driver inside io.sys? LOL btw: vista is supported. just give it a XP driver.
	on 17 May 2007 at 2:26 pm 75. Martin said … Good and worthy rant. Sad to say it isn’t just Adaptec, it increasingly seems to be the norm. Half ass products (be it software or hardware), an I don’t give a shit attitude and screw you I’ll keep your $. I’ve been in this biz since 1981 and the last two years have just about driven me to want a career in Afghanistan growing poppies.
	on 10 Jun 2007 at 2:24 pm 76. Helico said … Damn it, I’ve got to this page TOO LATE! Just bought that piece of crap. Now I’m cryin’ the hell out of it. It’s a TOTAL CRAP!
	on 19 Jun 2007 at 9:10 pm 77. Jeremy said … Pretending that it is ‘hardware RAID’ (which is what I was told) is akin to pretending that I’m Santa Clause, flying on a fleet of flying cows.
	on 28 Jun 2007 at 5:12 am 78. Hinnavaatluse Foorumid :: vaata teemat - soodus hardware sata-raid? said … [...] korraks vaatasin t�esti seda 1420′i, aga paistab, et v�ga ei soovitata seda: http://www.brentnorris.net/blog/?p=158 [...]
	on 29 Jun 2007 at 8:16 pm 79. Experts Round Table Network - Hardware RAID vs. fakeRAID vs. Software RAID said … [...] 3ware seems to be the reference brand for true hardware RAID.Example of rant about fakeRAID:  http://www.brentnorris.net/blog/?p=158I have tried installing Ubuntu on nvidia fakeRAID (nForce 430).It seems the only linux distributions [...]
	on 20 Jul 2007 at 11:05 am 80. Darren said … You got your wish, No 1 hit in Google for the term “adaptec 1420sa vista” Weel done! I’ve bought this card and thought I’d done well. Bugger..
	on 04 Aug 2007 at 4:46 pm 81. Jody said … Got one for work a while back, it is complete crap. Thanks for going to all the effort of doing this “blog” webpage thing. BTW google search of “adaptec 1420 review” is what led me here
	on 17 Aug 2007 at 12:44 am 82. iFX said … Glad I came across this… I was looking at Adaptec SATA RAID cards… not this particular model - but I remember having problems with some of their other products in the past – this just confirmed my hesitation on buying another Adaptec product. Definitely won’t be buying Adaptec. Thanks for the info.
	on 12 Sep 2007 at 4:50 am 83. The Informer said … FWAAHAHA!!! Thank goodness that I found this thread just in time! I bought this Adaptec POS but found this thread while it was still in transit. The vendor I purchased from had “No Returns” on this item (surprise!), but when I called them they were extremely helpful and told me “no problem, just decline delivery and we’ll credit your card”. They told me the reason they have to do that is that “some manufacturers want to force the customer to contact them directly before returning certain items.” Well, now – isn’t that interesting. Maybe Adaptec is getting concerned about this matter. So, I am purchasing a 3Ware 8006-2LP from the same vendor. I spoke with 3Ware just to confirm that this IS true hardware RAID, with a processor onboard. It sells for about the same price as the Adaptec ($120), so all this noise about how manufacturers can’t afford to include an onboard processor at that price point is pure speculation, and completely wrong. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if some hungry law firm files a class action against both Adaptec and IBM on behalf of consumers for damages as a result of deceptive marketing practices. I was completely fooled by the way the information was presented on Adaptec’s site, and believed that I was ordering a true Hardware RAID solution. I even knew ahead of time about the fake RAID issue – I was replacing a Promise controller for just that reason. I was still fooled by Adaptec. Our company will never purchase another Adaptec product. I had complete faith in them until this happened. Nothing but 3Ware from here on out.
	on 12 Sep 2007 at 6:29 am 84. The Informer said … For Google: Adaptec Serial Attached SCSI 44300 is broken Adaptec Serial Attached SCSI 44300 is junk Adaptec Serial Attached SCSI 44300 is useless Adaptec Serial Attached SCSI 44300 is NOT a RAID controller Adaptec Serial Attached SCSI 44800 is broken Adaptec Serial Attached SCSI 44800 is junk Adaptec Serial Attached SCSI 44800 is useless Adaptec Serial Attached SCSI 44800 is NOT a RAID controller
	on 16 Sep 2007 at 7:59 am 85. r said … >how can you call it a software raid when you can run i.e. MS-DOS for it. It installs a hidden driver inside io.sys? LOL >btw: vista is supported. just give it a XP driver. The card has an option ROM that is executed by the BIOS during the early hardware initialization stages. This ROM, among other things, will hook some of the BIOS-provided device I/O routines by overloading the interrupt vectors. So, yes, you can think of it as installing a hidden driver. But, no, it doesn’t install it inside io.sys. Get a clue! LOL
	on 23 Sep 2007 at 2:37 am 86. CentralOntario said … Class Action Would Be a Good Idea Couldn’t agree more with most posts here. The Adaptec, Intel, HP, IBM, et al marketing on these “RAID” adapters is misleading. These so-called RAID controllers are not reliable, drain system resources, and add nothing to any system other than more aggravation. Stay away from Adaptec Host RAID and Intel Host RAID or whatever you call it!
	on 03 Oct 2007 at 12:03 am 87. Nabble - SATA RAID: Adaptec 1420SA, Promise TX4300? said … [...] so >that I can avoid their cards. Forget both cards. Neither of the two is hardware RAID, see: http://www.brentnorris.net/blog/?p=158 http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html Cheating people and selling software RAID cards where [...]
	on 30 Oct 2007 at 1:22 pm 88. Serial ATA (SATA) on Linux said … [...] to be a cheap OEM from someone else, but the chipset identity is unknown. Note Brent Norris’s scathing review. Beware of Adaptec’s term “HostRaid”: This means fakeraid, not real hardware RAID. Adaptec offers [...]
	on 06 Nov 2007 at 9:32 am 89. Re: SATA RAID: Adaptec 1420SA, Promise TX4300? said … [...] so >that I can avoid their cards. Forget both cards. Neither of the two is hardware RAID, see: http://www.brentnorris.net/blog/?p=158 http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html Cheating people and selling software RAID cards where [...]
	on 20 Nov 2007 at 2:23 pm 90. Biker said … I bought the 1420SA because I have used Adaptec products for years and wanted a 4-drive hardware-assisted RAID solution, rather than just utilizing what little CPU was available in this old machine in an XP software RAID. I wasted a couple of days running various disk speed tests, with different configurations of RAID 0 (2, 3, 4 drive) JBOD, etc, etc … trying to figure out why I wasn’t see true RAID 0 performance. I got a 10% boost on 2 drives, but hit a plateau. No change with 3 or 4 drives. Then I ran across this blog .. what a surprise. I wasn’t crazy, at least not about this. I’ve been in this business for 30 years and (embarrasingly) was duped by the “HostRAID” jargon too. Just for fun, I set the card back to 4 JBOD drives and turned on XP software RAID. Got 20% better performance than RAID through the card’s driver. What a crock.
	on 08 Dec 2007 at 4:40 am 91. vass said … Congrats on this page, top result for “adaptec 1420sa review” in google btw. Have the so-called “support” departments ever considered that “buy-a-second-more-expensive-product” is a thought that has already crossed people’s minds and was almost instantly rejected? The reason we send mail to support in the first place is “I’m stuck with your stuff, please provide more info than google”. I was looking for a better solution than the on-board SATA2 wannabe-RAID controllers for a new HTPC, either PCIe or at least PCI-X. Unfortunately the market does not target consumers yet. Proper HW cards are so expensive one might as well buy a custom Dell Workstation. I have one at work, running flawlessly with any of win64, ubuntu and RHEL5. But can’t afford it at home.
	on 23 Dec 2007 at 7:38 am 92. Justin Wong said … I tried and using it on Centos.
	on 15 Jan 2008 at 4:01 pm 93. Jeremiah said … After reading through the comments here, I decided to shop harder for a SATA-II RAID controller. Check this out… You can pick up a 3ware 9550SXU-4LP with real hardware RAID for $300 with free shipping from Newegg.com. Then, if you’re a first time 3ware customer, you can pick up a $50 “First Time Buyer” rebate. (For another $100, you can add an optional battery backup module.) $250 is probably the cheapest price you’ll pay for an actual SATA RAID controller. It’s tempting, but I really just need an inexpensive, non-raid, SATA-II PCI-X controller for my HTPC. But, I can’t find one without hostRAID or something similar. I’m probably the last guy on the planet building a PCI-X + AGP 8x system, I know. So, does anybody want to sell me their used Adaptec 1420SA? jpatoka at gmail dot com
	on 15 Jan 2008 at 4:06 pm 94. Jeremiah said … Correction: the $50 instant savings is only from a 3ware “Authorized Distribution Partner”. It is not a rebate that can be used on a purchase from Newegg.
	on 04 Feb 2008 at 10:02 am 95. Controller ADAPTEC 1430SA SATA RAID PCIE - Computer Games Forum said … [...] placa de baza… Acest articol este relevant in directia asta, oferind numeroase explicatii: http://www.brentnorris.net/blog/?p=158 Concluzia articolului e ca la banii astia e imposibil sa gasesti ceva hardware. Cele hardware sunt [...]
	on 15 Feb 2008 at 8:09 am 96. Nico said … For google: Adaptec aar81xx is BROKEN Adaptec 1420SA needs three days to rebuild a 500 GB volume Adaptec 1420SA is installed in HP ML150 G2 and G3 We bought a couple of ML150 servers from HP with this shitty card installed, first is just does not run ok even with the supplied aar81xx module but even on a windows machine this card sucks bigtime! We replaced everything with 3ware and that is the one and only thing we will be buying in the future. HP is full of bullshit when it comes to linux support!
	on 16 Feb 2008 at 12:17 pm 97. Jeremiah said … Nico, do you need to get rid of one of those Adaptec 1420SA controllers? I don’t plan on using the hostRAID features, but I do need a SATA2-PCIX controller. contact me via jpatoka at gmail dot com
	on 20 Feb 2008 at 1:06 pm 98. Barracuda said … Message to 91.vass, but also for others: I know, maybe out of date or not fit into Your conceptions http://www.areca.us/products/2ports.htm Areca ARC-1200 – most compelling PCIe x1 to SATA ll RAID solution which economically delivers full-featured TRUE HARDWARE RAID to desktop and workstations as well as entry-level servers. For just $169.99 from Newegg.com P.S. As many of You, I bought another piece of crap with brand Adaptec, 2 years ago. This site was one of very useful for me. From that time I strictly recommend product of 3ware (1x 3ware 8006-4LP) one is on my own or Areca (ARC-1160ML) – 10 backend storage/file mirroring servers for business – an local ISP provider.
	on 13 Mar 2008 at 11:45 pm 99. HostRaid vs ZCR for RAID 10 said … [...] also still seems to make a true hardware RAID card.Nice little rant on Host Raid cards.http://www.brentnorris.net/blog/?p=158   10.25.2006 at 10:22PM PDT, ID: 17809410 moruda: SAS 15k RPM   [...]
	on 21 Mar 2008 at 2:39 am 100. PieterB’s blog » Blog Archive » Allemaal ‘fakeraid’. said … [...] Vroeger had Promise een goede naam. Maar blijkbaar is de TX2300 die ik eerst op het oog had ook fakeraid. En de Adaptec 1420SA noemt adaptec zelf een ‘HostRAID’-controller. Ook grote brol volgens deze blog. [...]
	on 13 Apr 2008 at 8:05 am 101. Small Business Technology Blog » Fake RAID Cards - from Adaptec? said … [...] Brent Norris has written a scathing article on this very card. This where i learned what HostRAID really meant. [...]
	on 23 Apr 2008 at 10:33 pm 102. Justin Wong said … Today i discovered that. Adaptec 1420SA is not JUNK in CentOS 5 (Linux version 2.6.18-8.el5). I installed 2 set of server and using 1420SA . Fully function in CentOS 5 (Linux version 2.6.18-8.el5). Friends you can try it. ### Must using CentOS 5 (Linux version 2.6.18-8.el5) ###
	on 24 Apr 2008 at 5:23 am 103. Brent said … Justin, so did some aspect of their driver suddenly make the card a true hardware RAID card? No? Well then it is still Junk in my opinion. If they didn’t market it as a hardware RAID card then that would be different, but since that is what they sell it as and that is what it is NOT, then my opinion is JUNK.
	on 25 Apr 2008 at 2:29 pm 104. roms said … This card is only a RAID 0 or RAID 1 , there is no RAID 5 so no need of a big processor in it … Work like a charm in RAID on Windows 2003 & Linux (Since 2006) I think this card was created just to give some raid feature at a very low price (in france)
	on 25 Apr 2008 at 4:15 pm 105. Brent said … See that is the thing Rom: This card provides the illusion of a hardware RAID card, while in reality all it does it have the OS do the RAID. There is no reason for it in either Windows or Linux since both OSes already have that in them. Cards like this are the WinModems or RAID. They don’t really do anything other than provide the interface for the OS and CPU on your computer to do the work. This card is NOT a RAID card. It is a SATA interface card that works with some drivers to fake RAID inside your OS.
	on 25 May 2008 at 11:55 pm 106. Adam Pierce » Adaptec 1430SA on Debian Linux “Etch” said … [...] not the only one discovering this, Brent Norris wrote a wonderful article titled “Adaptec 1420SA is JUNK!” on his blog which describes pretty much the exact situation I find myself in which Adaptec [...]
	on 31 May 2008 at 11:36 am 107. Kevin O'Gorman said … Sheesh! I shoulda found this page before I bought this crap. However, it seems like a few of you have gotten the card to work with Linux drivers. Which drivers? As it stands, my aic7xxx driver is trying and failing to work with this card, possibly because there’s already an Adaptec SCSI controller in here. Advice, anyone? (In the absense of which, I’m just going to junk this) ++ kevin
	on 04 Jun 2008 at 11:33 am 108. Jeff said … I am another one of those “I wish I had seen this site before.” However, I got the PCIe 4x 1430SA card. Website for the card says that SuSE is supported. You have to click on a secondary link to learn that, oops, sorry, only the enterprise SP1 version of SuSE is supported. My OpenSuSE 10.3 is of course not. I tried that whole SHIM driver build, but the instructions are 2 years old…just like SLED 10 SP1. This is a FANTASTIC sata card if you want to add 4 internal sata ports. Calling it a RAID is a sad joke. Claiming linux support is false advertising. Now, a word from Adaptec: “Response (Tvrtko Fritz) – 06/03/2008 05:55 AM Hello from ADAPTEC, HostRaid Controllers are (compared to our AAC Raid Controllers) not supported out of the box with linux. You will need to build the driver from http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/speed/raid/aar/linux/aar81xx-openbuild-b11949_i386_tar_gz.htm Adaptec is currently providing this driver “as it is” – without technical support. You can find useful tips under linux.adaptec.com Best Regards ADAPTEC Technical Support”
	on 21 Jun 2008 at 11:14 am 109. Mick said … Oh, dear. After being happy with previous products from Adaptec I got sloppy and purchased a 1430SA … just to end up here. Well, bye bye Adaptec. I’ll try to return the card or have a ritual burning party. Man how expensive is a real hardware solution for an 0,1,10 RAID device.
	on 27 Jun 2008 at 12:02 pm 110. Anwar said … So.. basicly.. when you’re going to use the 1420/1430 cards as a SATA JBOD solution it will work just fine? Just the RAID functionality is a drama? btw, nice artitle Brent!!!
	on 09 Jul 2008 at 7:44 am 111. Duane said … If anyone actually reads down this far…. These HostRAID cards are a little misunderstood. Are they a bit crappy? Well, yes. If you want high-performance RAID, spend $100 more and get a RAID 0/1 Hardware solution or $300 more and get a RAID 5 Hardware solution. Beware some of the cheap Hardware RAID cards as they may claim to run RAID5 (Dell CERC SATA, or SAS5ir/SAS6ir). They will run the crap out of a RAID 1, 0, or 10 array, but put RAID5 on them and you will take 3 drives and end up with 50% of the performance of 1 drive. I would venture that software RAID5 would run faster, but that is something I hope I never find out. HERE is how HostRAID controllers beat the pants off true software (OS-controlled) RAID. While it is true they use system resources, they don’t require the OS to be running, which should use less overhead as the OS has one less thing to think about. The real benefit is when your OS gets hosed you still have a fully functional RAID array supported by the BIOS so you can easily retrieve your data. Or, if you want to upgrade to a new OS, you don’t have to break the RAID, then reinstall, then recreate the RAID. Or, in a RAID1 (with windows software RAID, at least) if drive 1 of 2 goes bad, there are additional recovery steps to get the system up again. With HostRAID, it just rebuilds (yes it rebuilds incredibly slowly, but it does just rebuild like a real RAID controller). If you want RAID0 for performance or RAID1 only for redundancy, and aren’t talking mission-critical, then HostRAID is a viable option. If you have SATA RAID on your motherboard (ICHxR chipset) then don’t buy a HostRAID card since you already have it. If you want optimal performance on RAID0 or added benefits of striped read performance on RAID1, then you have to get at least a cheap Hardware RAID controller (around $200). Keep the write cache off on these since they don’t have battery backup. If you step up to RAID5, 5E, 6, etc, then you need a bad-boy expensive RAID card or you’re wasting time. If you gotta have RAID-5 and cheap, Promise makes an interesting option by using a cheap processor specifically geared for RAID-5 calculations. It doesn’t have battery backup or lots of cache RAM, but assuming it works it gets hardware RAID-5 done at a fraction of the price.
	on 20 Aug 2008 at 5:50 am 112. Re: [NovellSchools] Acer R520 and SLES10? said … [...] before I cast it aside as a very, very bad idea. You might find the following link interesting: http://www.brentnorris.net/blog/archives/158 _______________________________________________ NovellSchools mailing list [...]
	on 23 Aug 2008 at 5:44 pm 113. patel said … Dear Friends, I have ADAPTEC 2130slp without battary back up default option is write catch and i am confuse on option, according to adaptec manual its say’s that must select default which is write catch. i dont know whether i should choose write catch or write through ?? can some one tell’s me that what is different between write back, write catch and write through? Thank You
	on 23 Aug 2008 at 6:15 pm 114. Brent said … This doesn’t really have anything to do with the post, but none the less: Write through means that the card doesn’t cache the writes to the drives. That means that as soon as something attempts to write to the drive it gets written, but you are limited to the speed the drive can write information Write cache (not catch) means that the memory on the card caches the writes so that the OS can go on, and then as the drives can handle the data it writes it out. That means that things can go on without waiting for the drives to finish writing, but it also means that a power outage could leave you without all your data, because the cache might not be written out.
	on 08 Sep 2008 at 7:26 pm 115. Julius said … I think everyone is getting a bit too cranky here Dont hate the player hate the game lol Most cheap cards that offer raid5 for < $150 AU are going to be “fakeraid”. Just because a card is fakeraid doesnt meant it will be of no use, im planning to use a 1430SA purely as a sata controller for my md array. That said i remember hearing the driver for the silicon image chipset on that card had data corruption issues so im still not buying it just yet
	on 30 Oct 2008 at 6:10 pm 116. POOKMARK Airlines - f-shin さんの行き先 （タグ：RAID） said … [...] Brent’s Thoughts » Adaptec 1420SA is JUNK! [...]
	on 22 Dec 2008 at 10:35 pm 117. Ubuntu中文论坛 • 查看主题 - 谁能准确的区分一下fakeRAID和HostRAID said … [...] 引用:We recently purchased a Adaptec SATA II RAID card model number 1420SA. Everywhere that this was marketed, it was listed as a “Hardware Raid” card, which we took to mean that it actually did RAID in hardware. Turns out that the cards has what Adaptec laughingly calls “HostRAID”. We didn’t know at the time how HostRAID got its name, but turns out it is really descriptive. They call it HostRAID, because the damn host machine does the RAID, not the card. They are selling SATA controllers that simulate hardware RAID, by moving the software RAID into the driver and out of the OS’s control. How is it ok for them to market this as a hardware RAID solution?http://www.brentnorris.net/blog/archives/158 [...]
	on 11 May 2009 at 12:37 pm 118. Richard said … Thanks for the article, definately won’t be buying this Adaptec card for my Linux server! Thanks

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