Adaptec today began shipping its Ultra320 SCSI controller, a PCI host adapter that offers transfer speeds of up to 546MB/sec over two channels or 1.09GB/sec with two controllers.

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 273MB/sec over a single channel in a five-drive configuration and to 546MB/sec over two channels with 10 drives, which is "more than 60 percent faster than the nearest competitor."

Adaptec's card also offers RAID 1 embedded hardware mirroring and RAID 0 and 10 support with Ultra320 SCSI products, including support for up to six drives per array plus a hot swappable spare, up to two arrays per SCSI channel, auto-recovery of a failed disk drive, and background data scrubbing to ensure data integrity. The card features the AIC-7902, a 64-bit/133MHz PCI-X interface and support for up to 30 SCSI devices across two Ultra320 SCSI channels.

Through the end of the month, Adaptec will buy non-Mac OS X compatible SCSI cards, upon purchase of a Power Domain card directly from Adaptec.

by MacNN Staff