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Reviews (1)
02 Dec, 2020
A fantastic, fast HBA, but read the whole review for some requirements & gotchas
At first I was only getting ~800kB/s through this card. After some troubleshooting, reseating the SAS connectors, changing kernel versions, etc. the situation did not consistently improve.
At this point I removed the card from the PCIe slot and noticed that, compared to a USB 3.0 PCIe card I happened to have right next to me out of sheer luck, the PCI bracket was mounted on the wrong side of the PCB. This was preventing the card from going all the way into the PCIe slot.
After correcting that I am getting full speed to all drives on all ports simultaneously. It must have been a bad PCIe electrical connection.
On to the details!
You MUST ensure adequate airflow! The PCB has "THIS CARD NEEDS 200LFM AIRFLOW" printed on the silkscreen, and I don't doubt it. As I'm using this in an ATX tower, and my side panel does not have a fan mounting position, I mounted a 120mm fan onto the inside of it instead, and built a cardboard shroud around it with some duct tape. It's a bit ghetto, but it works, keeping the card under 55 Celsius. Ensure you set a fan failure alarm on your motherboard header! See the pictures attached to this review for more details.
One thing I wish this card had is an array of headers for hard-drive activity LEDs. Now that I'm not using any of the SATA ports on my motherboard, the HDD LED header on the motherboard will never activate, and so I've moved the chassis HDD LED connector to the card's ALARM header. I would have preferred if there were individual headers for each drive (or at least each SFF-8643 connector), and a master header for all drives, so that I could connect the chassis HDD LED to the latter. This is a very minor quibble though.
Note that the ALARM header outputs a constant 3.3V on one pin, and has a 2kHz open collector on the other pin (as per Adaptec's installation manual), so this is suitable for driving most chassis LEDs, as the ATX motherboard specification calls for 3.3V LEDs too, and most LEDs will not mind being turned on and off 2,000 times per second. Activating the alarm test functionality with ARCCONF does illuminate my LED.
I recommend staying out of the UEFI HII administrative interface on this card. Even after I put the card in HBA mode and powered off, and then connected my hard-drives, upon entering the interface again to confirm it detected all of them (which it did), I booted my operating system to discover that the drives had had their partition tables wiped.
This was not an immediate concern, because I use GPT, which places a backup copy of the table at the end of the drive, and I don't create partitions that occupy the whole drive -- I leave 128 MiB of unallocated (non-partitioned) space at the beginning and end of drives, for precisely this sort of reason. I've had all sorts of drive corruption issues with controllers and operating system installers (I'm looking at you, Windows) over the years that have taught me this lesson the hard way. Always partition (even if it's only going to be 1 partition), and always leave a large gap around them.
Anyway, while the Linux kernel will only read the primary GPT at the start of the drive (which was now missing), gdisk(8) (from GPTFDISK) can restore this backup partition table (at the end of the drive) for you automatically, so I was back in business straight away. Stick to the ARCCONF command-line utility for querying and configuring it; this has not happened again (even after connecting more drives) since I did that.
Also note that if you want to use ARCCONF under Linux, you will *need* to disable "CONFIG_HARDENED_USERCOPY_PAGESPAN" in your kernel. You can have the regular hardened usercopy option enabled, but the _PAGESPAN sub-option makes ARCCONF segfault.
Overall this is a fantastic card (especially for this price; £42!), with a few warts but no show-stopping gotchas. It will easily talk to 16 hard-drives simultaneously, without any observable bottlenecks.
Note that I have not tested the BIOS boot functionality (as I have a UEFI machine with the CSM disabled). Nor have I tested any SAS expanders, though it does claim compatibility for up to 255 hard-drives if you choose to do so. Finally, I have not tested hardware RAID mode, as I use Linux mdraid and so put the card into HBA mode.