The MiniSAS Cables form factor fitted fairly well on RAID

The next part was inserting the RAID controller card into a PCI-E slot, which only took a couple of minutes. Time to tell you, I already bought a new mainboard a few weeks ago as I knew that I would need another PCI-E 8x slot. Anyway, after closing my PC again, I connected the DX800RAID with two MiniSAS Cables to the PC and with a power cable to the power supply. Before I should boot the system, I surely had to insert all eight drives, which was done in a couple of minutes as well. Finally I should boot the system.6GBit is the best-case throughput of the two mini-SAS ports. To my calculations, that is 750MB/s, but in the case of RAID6 it has to write two parity informations to the disk, which have the same size as the data written to it, so that results in a speed about 750 / 3, which is 250MB/s, which kinda is my measured performance.Adaptec 7 and 8 series controllers have moved to the new mini-SAS-HD (high-density – codename 8643) cable as opposed to the previous External MiniSAS (codename 8087) connector of the 3, 5 and 6 series controllers.
The result is the need to put more than 8 direct connections on a low-profile RAID card. Only problem is that this can’t physically be done with 8087 connectors – they are too big. So Adaptec looked to the future, and looked at the industry-standard connector being introduced in the very near future for the 12gb SAS standard – the MiniSAS Cables connector The MiniSAS Cables connector can plug in to a mini-SAS PCI Express card in a Mac Pro or PC server, or you can attach it via the 9-port hub to share the storage between 8 workstations or connect multiple Jupiter systems with an LSI switch. Connect 8 workstations through a 9-port hub and each of them gets 24Gbps bandwidth; connect two channels with two cables and you can get 48Gbps. The management software lets you zone specific drives to specific servers or workstations, or pool the storage for general use....