Specifications
We've got three products to flesh out in this review. A RAID card, a disk enclosure and the disks themselves. Let's start with the card.
We'll be testing an SLI MegaRAID SAS 8408E card, with eight ports running at 3Gbps. Here's a more detailed spec list:
| Feature | Specification |
|---|---|
| Ports | Eight internal SAS/SATA ports |
| Connectivity | Two x4 SFF 8484 connectors |
| Data rate | 3 Gb/s throughput per port full duplex |
| Redundancy | RAID Levels 0, 1, 5, 10 and 50 |
| Capacity | Greater than 2TB array support |
| Processor | Intel® IOP333 I/O Processor |
| Host interface | PCI Express 1.0a compliant 2.5 Gb/s per lane x8 lane width |
| Memory | 256MB DDRII 400MHz SDRAM intelligent transportable battery backed* DIMM module |
| Error handling | Advanced data integrity and recovery enhanced error handling and reporting |
| FlexRAID®: | Online Capacity Expansion (OCE) Online RAID Level Migration (RLM) Comprehensive management and configuration utilities Full SAS expander support (32 disk support) |
*The card we received didn't have a battery backed memory module.
What we have here is a card that means business. It's got an x8 PCIe SATA connection, suggesting it's going to need plenty of bandwidth and it supports eight serial-attached SCSI or SATA drives. It's got DDR2 RAM on board. So, on paper, it looks pretty decent.
The 8408E will be plugged into a Supermicro enclosure.
| Feature | Specification |
|---|---|
| Occupancy | 3x 5.25" Drive Bays |
| Capacity | 5x 1" Host Receptacle Connectors, SATA hot-swap hard drives |
| Cooling Subsystem | 90mm Exhaust Fan |
| System Monitoring | Fan Fail Detection LED and Alarm Overheat LED indication |
| Dimension (WxHxD) | 146mm x 129mm x 245mm |
| Weight | Net: 5.9lb (2.9 kg), Gross: 7.5lb (3.7 kg) |
A SCSI version of the same enclosure exists, featuring termination and drive failed warnings.
Finally we have the disks themselves. Five ST3750640AS 750GB SATA drives from storage kings, Seagate.
| Feature | Specification |
|---|---|
| Capacity | 750.1GB |
| Recording technology | Perpendicular |
| Interface | SATA 3Gbps |
| Buffer | 16MiB |
| Spindle speed | 7200rpm |
| Avg. seek time | <8.5ms |
| Sustained transfer rate | Up to 78MB/s |
Pat yourself on the back if you've waded through that lot. Let's dwell on the specs no longer and actually get involved...
