RAID AAR-2830SA 128MB Card

[Cr0nJ0b]

I'm looking for specs on this card, and can't find anything online.

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

wow, no one has seen this?

 

[Sheninat0r]

Apparently not - who is the manufacturer?

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Originally posted by: Sheninat0r
Apparently not - who is the manufacturer?

Adaptec. But that was the most I could find out about it.

 

[axemann]

I'm having the same issue. Got 4 of these guys from a dude on Ebay. They seem to be very close cousins to the Adaptec RAID 3805 (that's the driver that XP installed, anyway...) The card definitely has a different layout than the 3805, but seems to be the same basic specs. Not sure if it supports Online Capacity Expansion, though. But hey... For $80 + shipping, I can't b!tch too much...

 

[jackwhitter]

from slides in 2006 that adaptec had, this card looks to be only a SATA raid card and based on the aic-8210 asic (same raid engine as the 2820sa.. matches up with the model numbers too.)

@axemann,
do your cards work? what kind of speed? any driver troubles? the 3800 series uses intel's sas/sata raid risc processors. this would be very different from adaptec's 8210 asic. i tested the 2420 and 2820 and they were solid raid cards for sata (great bios, good software, moderate performance, raid 5 worked well.. tested degraded too.)

links:
http://stor.chinaitlab.com/news/472706.html

http://64.233.167.104/search?q...gl=us&client=firefox-a

 

[axemann]

So far, only one out of the 4 seems to "work". One I tested had a bad port #1, the other one had a b0rked BIOS/firmware... The last one, interestingly enough, has no heatsink, so I didn't strap it in to test it (these babies get pretty warm from what I can tell...), but the XOR/processor is actually made by Vitesse (the VSC7250XHL).

I was fooling around tonight and nuked Linux off of my soon-to-be media server, and strapped Server 2k3 on it. I had made a custom install CD with Bashrat-the-Sneaky's Driverpacks (www.driverpacks.net), and it installed the drivers again as an Adaptec RAID 3805 (same as before). I did a little detective work and found out that the drivers got installed from one of the IBM directories contained in the Driverpacks. I've since been poring over the 'Net trying to find out some more information related to that, but no luck so far... Trust me, though, I'll keep looking... More updates later...

 

[Blain]

What's up with ebay sellers having to replace multiple hardware based RAID cards?
This is not the first time I've heard of multiple returns from ebay sellers.
The other 4 card merry-go-round were LSI cards.

I guess if the cards are "system pulls" you take your chances.

 

[jackwhitter]

i've had good luck reflashing cards like that with working firmware from other good card (they can still be flashed even if the card won't "boot"). stick a heatsink on the one missing a heatsink, and try her out.

any word on performance, bios, or adaptec software working with the card? thanks!

//edit

in what pcie slots does this work? the vitesse quick specs indicate the card will work in x1 through x8 slots (open ended x1, x2, or x4 slots.)

and xor processor spec:

"The MIPS64 5Kc is a high-performance, synthesizeable 64-bit RISC processor core optimized for low-power, battery-operated, system-on-a-chip and ASIC applications. Featuring a peak clock frequency of 310 MHz (0.13 micron process), the 5Kc core consumes just 0.5 mW/MHz. The 5Kc features a six-stage pipeline with branch control and single-cycle execution for most instructions, a co-processor interface, a 64-entry MMU, and up to 64 kbytes each of 4-way set-associative cache."

 

[jackwhitter]

it installed from the ibm directory because the ibm ServeRAID 8k uses the same vitesse asic:

http://developer.novell.com/yes/83887.htm

 

[naro]

Hmm.. so this is another version of Adaptec 3805SAS??

i'm a bit tempted to try this out. However, has anyone managed to update the firmware of the card??