Adaptec today released the world’s fastest Ultra320 SCSI controller, an adapter that scales to 546 megabytes per second over two channels and to an industry-leading 1.09 gigabytes per second over two controllers. The Adaptec Ultra320 SCSI controller dovetails with Ultra320 SCSI disk drives from leading drive provider Seagate Technology to deliver the fastest SCSI throughput available. The tandem is ideal for data-intensive applications where performance and ownership costs are paramount.
In sequential read and write performance tests of the Adaptec SCSI Card 39320D with Seagate Cheetah 10K RPM Ultra320 SCSI disk drives, the Adaptec controller doubled data transfer rates from 273 megabytes per second over one channel in a five-drive configuration and to 546 megabytes per second over two channels with 10 drives, more than 60 percent faster than the nearest competitor, to deliver industry-leading throughput.
In power consumption — a measure crucial to low-profile server environments where heat is a key factor — the Adaptec Ultra320 ASIC ran at just over 4 Watts, significantly lower than competitive products and correspondingly cooler. Lower power consumption extends card life to reduce cost of ownership and is important in systems where reliability is crucial. In addition, the thermally efficient design of both the ASIC and the Adaptec 39320D simplify system design.
“The Adaptec SCSI Card 39320D is without equal in combining high performance and low power consumption,” said Ahmet Houssein, vice president of the host input/output business line for Adaptec’s Storage Solutions Group. “Together with Seagate’s Ultra320 disk drives, the controller delivers the system throughput necessary for video editing, streaming video and audio, calculation-intensive applications including finite elemental analysis and geophysical imagery creation, and other bandwidth-hungry environments.”
“The continuing growth in the amount of data companies need to manage makes efficient information access, storage, and management essential,” said Brian Dexheimer, Seagate executive vice president of worldwide sales, marketing, and customer service. “Seagate and Adaptec have leveraged a product engineering and development relationship spanning several generations of SCSI to streamline Ultra320 data transfers for high-performance applications and provide unsurpassed performance, interoperability and reliability.”
The Adaptec SCSI Card 39320D and AIC-7902, Adaptec’s Ultra320 SCSI ASIC, are now shipping to major OEM customers. According to Adaptec, they are the only company to offer RAID 1 embedded hardware mirroring and RAID 0 and 10 support with Ultra320 SCSI products. Competitive implementations require external memory that can add significant cost to the motherboard.
