Comments on: Adaptec 1420SA is JUNK!

By: Willibald

Willibald — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 19:52:26 +0000

If you need storage solutions for redundancy – hardware or fake RAID – you also need an extra (identical) controller card that you have tested to be working in the running system. Why? If the controller fails, all your data is gone until you find a replacement card with the same bios version, hw rev no etc etc. Can take weeks to get your “redundant” array on-line again.

Then if one disk fails in a 4 TB RAID-5 array? With a low-end Adaptec fake-raid in a server with slow CPU, it is probably more cost effective to buy a complete new server, install the OS, controller card and rebuild the array from there.

So the bad news for all of you still using Adaptec’s fakeraid: move your data to a safer place (software raid, for example) before the shit hits the fan for real. If finding a working driver for your system is such painful experience for many posters here – just wait until you need the “RAID-features” you think you had. It can’t get more painful for a systems administrator to realise that redundancy was just redifened by Adaptec for marketing reasons.

A have had my battles with many different Adaptec’s SATA-controllers (both HW and fake-raid). My conclusion after those years is: stay away from them. The good Adaptec cards as we know them from the SCSI-era were designed by a different type of engineers. Those cards were fast. Adaptec cards of today are slow. Even the most expensive ones are slower than almost anything else.

If I need a new SAS/SATA controller today, LSI Logic is my personal favourite. They seem to hire the type of engineers Adaptec used to do.

By: [ubuntu] Server won't boot - Ubuntu Forums

[ubuntu] Server won't boot - Ubuntu Forums — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:22:27 +0000

[...] complaint from someone from years ago which was probably the last time I played around with them: http://www.brentnorris.net/blog/archives/158 Here's the card in question: http://www.adaptec.com/NR/rdonlyres/…1430SA_ds2.pdf …under OS [...]

By: Alex

Alex — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 01:00:45 +0000

Hi everyone,

I remember, back in the day, Promise took their standard ATA/100 PCI controllers and flashed them with a different firmware to make them a software “RAID” controller. This was way back in about 2001.

Since the 1420 (which I am also unfortunate enough to own) is really just a SATA-II controller with a boot-time GUI that writes the RAID configuration to disk in the form of a superblock, I wonder if the firmware from another basic Adaptec card could be written to this one, to make it a plain old vanilla SATA-2 controller again?

Then perhaps it could be put to some use….I hate throwing money away!!

Cheers

Alex

By: Maximurx

Maximurx — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 11:49:28 +0000

Hello Brent,

thanks for keeping this blog alive. Adaptec is not a company someone really need today. They live from the name they made in the ‘90. But today there are enough other companies that do a better job in

* manufacturing
* software development (performance!, compatibility, open source)
* support

By: Zeitkind

Zeitkind — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 10:03:30 +0000

Well.. I came here by google too: “Dell cerc forget settings bios raid”
My intial problem is a Precision WorkStation 670 with 2 SATA drives without RAID enabled. I noticed the FakeRAID before installing Windows XP, so I switched it off in BIOS. Was working fine till the BIOS started to “forget” that RAID is off: BSOD with a 0×0000007b. Took me some time to figure out what was going wrong with that machine, thx to Dell to put such a crap on a workstation motherboard (it’s an ASUS OEM anyway AFAIK). Thanks to the blog I now know that RAID support *on* is the default setting, so I will try to get a new motheboard battery – hope it will fix the issue. Anyone had this before?
For cheap RAID cards I suggest Areca. Running fine with Debian vanilla since it is fully supported. Not sure about RH or SuSE, but the drivers are open source.

By: �ٶ��_10PCS/Lot, New PCI SATA Sil3112A Serial Host Chipset SATA (AT ...

�ٶ��_10PCS/Lot, New PCI SATA Sil3112A Serial Host Chipset SATA (AT ... — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 15:20:29 +0000

[...] [...]

By: HelloNewman

HelloNewman — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 01:45:44 +0000

4 years on since this article the card is still for sale. I was nearly going to buy it and glad this link was 2nd on a google search for 1420SA, sitting just below Adaptec’s link.-

I would have been scammed as I was expecting hardware raid.

Thank you very much Brent for taking the time back then to write this blog.

By: lelik

lelik — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 20:20:00 +0000

excuse my “french” but Adaptec is su***, really. I thrown card as Adaptec dealer refused to accept it on the following day! I didn’t know that it wont word on linux..

By: Richard

Richard — Mon, 11 May 2009 18:37:10 +0000

Thanks for the article, definately won’t be buying this Adaptec card for my Linux server!

Thanks

By: Ubuntu中文论坛 • 查看主题 - 谁能准确的区分一下fakeRAID和HostRAID

Ubuntu中文论坛 • 查看主题 - 谁能准确的区分一下fakeRAID和HostRAID — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 05:35:10 +0000

[...] 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 [...]