Question to the Storage Advisors: I have a really nice HP server to install exchange 2010 into. it is running ms server 2008 r2. it is a HP DL 370 G6 with 16-146 gb drives. they are attached to a P410i raid controller with 512 mb of cashe having both acceleration and battery backup setup. […]

Question from Ernst: I have installed an Adaptec 5445 and 3085 together running with WinXP Professional (32bit) on my workstation (an IBM IntelliStation Z-Pro). Both cards have the latest firmware BIOS installed. The driver is version 5.2-0 (17544). This driver is not available for the 3085 card. At least not from Adaptecs Support Web Site. […]

In one of my recent posts I mentioned the grey cable that is part of our standard mini-sas to sata cables. You can go and find that post if you want to find out more about that one, but …
I pointed out our integration guide to one of our readers to get an idea of […]

I was discussing a customer’s configuration the other day and noted, just as a matter of course, that he should update all firmware involved in his system … motherboard, backplane, card and drives and OS driver.
What surprised me, I presume because I’m used to this stuff, was the customers reaction to updating drive firmware. It […]

I spend a lot of time rabbiting on about using the correct RAID type to suit your data. RAID 5, 6, 50 or 60 (parity RAID) for streaming data and RAID 1, 10, 1E for random data (database). However, it has come to my attention that not a lot of people are really fully aware […]

When building an array using Adaptec RAID cards (hardware RAID 5 that is), you have various build options … clear, build/verify, quick init and (on newer firmwares) skip init.
These options give you choices in how you build your RAID 5 array. While choice is good, and the marketing team love to sprout the line “flexible […]

Well, deep down I really do hope you’ve been asking questions, but you probably stopped pretty quickly when you got no reply.
Not surprising since I only just worked out that email questions have been landing in a bit-bucket somewhere that is most certainly not my email address. This, however, I am assured will be fixed […]

It sort of sounded like “See Paris and Die” but now that I’ve typed it I don’t think it works. However … Adaptec have a stand at CeBIT. Why should I be interested? I put my hand up to stand on the stand and talk to people endlessly about our products, but the marketing team […]

Just had a discussion with a customer who has a 5805 raid card and 7 1tb drives (vendor not an issue here). He originally contacted me asking what the grey ribbon cable on the cables provided with our card were for, but we quickly moved past that to looking at his planned system config.
Note that […]

Not many people have picked up on the fact that we have a performance tuning option on our 5 series cards that optimises the card cache for OLTP. What is OLTP I hear you ask? Onlne Transaction Processing. Now why isn’t that OTP instead of OLTP? Doesn’t matter … I’m drifting again.
The setting can be […]