Helluva Deal! (Serial Attached SCSI Bundle)

[GIANT]

If you qualify, you can get a "SAS Bundle" direct from Adaptec for US$550 (+ your local sales tax, + $7.95 UPS ground shipping in USA).


The best open market pricing I've found on an Adaptec 48300 SAS HBA (8-port model with PCI-X/133 interface) and 2-each Seagate Cheetah 15K.4 36GB SAS hard drives has been:

• 
  $353 Adaptec 48300 SAS HBA
  $535 Seagate Cheetah 15K.4 36GB SAS ST373454SS
  $535 Seagate Cheetah 15K.4 36GB SAS ST373454SS
  ------------------------------------
  $1423 Subtotal

Definitely, a helluva deal at US$550!


http://www.adaptecstore.com/index.cfm?productid=sasbundle&source=seagate&bhcp=1

 

[timwhit]

Anyone think I could order this and then unload it on eBay for a profit?

 

[Mercutio]

Absolutely.

 

[sechs]

I got this deal in an e-mail from Seagate a week or so ago. Thought about getting it and dumping the second drive (don't need it). Except there's no legacy support support on this card, or any SAS card at which I've looked.

 

[GIANT]

I will eventually dump the Adaptec SAS HBA (PCI-X) for a PCI Express HBA from Adaptec, LSI Logic -- or go embedded-on-the-mobo -- when my time comes to jump to the clearly superior PCI Express expansion bus.

I ordered a "SAS bundle" Monday morning and and have it on the way now.

Anyone think I could order this and then unload it on eBay for a profit?

For one thing, I *believe* you have to "qualify" for this deal, as in either be a business, or be on a Who's Who List of sorts (none of this may actually be so). I'm a card carrying member of about half a dozen professional organisations that Adaptec would likely be interested in offering such promotional bundles to. Every once in a while, I will get E-mails or snail-mail offers like this from Intel, Adaptec, er... 10 or 15 others.

Otherwise, you may not want to give this stuff up so easily! I've demo'd a small server with direct-attached internal SAS RAID array and a non-RAID workststation with a SAS hard drive. In both cases they were significantly faster than similar Ultra320-based setups.

The firmware in these SAS drives is clearly a step above Ultra320 in efficiency, and of course you have full-duplex communications between the host bus adapter and the hard drive buffer/cache, which makes things fly in a multi-tasking environment.

PS: 2.5-inch 10kRPM SAS drives also kick butt.

 

[timwhit]

Well I placed an order. I will see if they actually ship it to me.

What I was thinking about doing is keeping the card and one drive and selling my old Cheetah 36ES and the other drive that it comes with.

 

[timwhit]

Am I correct in thinking that this card will work in a regular PCI slot?

 

[Bozo]

If I read correctly, the Adaptec card supports SATA also. Interesting.
Does that mean that SAS hard drives will work on a SATA controller?

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[timwhit]

I don't think the compatibility works that way. Only SATA drives work on SAS cards not the other way around.

 

[GIANT]

Am I correct in thinking that this card will work in a regular PCI slot?

As long as you have a relatively modern mobo (most P-III, all P4, virtually all -- if not every -- Athlon) you can use a PCI-X card, your 32-bit PCI bus has to have adequate 3.3-volt support. In other words, you need a mobo that supports PCI 2.2. The 8-channel Adaptec 48300 supports 4 internal SAS channels and 4 external SAS channels via fan-out cables. It can do bootable RAID-0, -1, and -10 (I don't plan on using any RAID with this card).

Also, you will need to put the PCI-X card into a slot where there are no physical obstructions, such as a chip or heatsink, near the mobo's 32-bit PCI connector, which is right where the 64-bit extension pins on the PCI-X card will hang out above the surface of your mobo. This may be a bit tough on some small form factor mobos -- unless they have a PCI-X slot.

If I read correctly, the Adaptec card supports SATA also. Interesting.

Every SAS host bus adapter is downward-compatible with SATA.

A majority of SAS users will sooner or later mix in some SATA storage for reasons of economy -- if not for hot-plug'n'play sneakernet transfers of massive amounts of data via a 300/400/500+ GB SATA hard drive.

Getting a little of topic: Once external SATA ports begin showing up on new desktop and notebook computers, SATA technology will eventually put a giant-sized dent in the external Firewire and USB hard drive marketplace. SATA can easily kick the proverbial ass of either Firewire 400/800 or USB 2.0 in a transfer race, not to mention do so at a lower price since there is no bridge involved (as in ATA-to-USB or ATA-to-Firewire) with an external SATA hard drive -- because it will be a native SATA connection.

Does that mean that SAS hard drives will work on a SATA controller?

You can mix and match SAS and SATA to you heart's content -- or even have no SAS at all and have nothing but SATA devices connected to your SAS host bus adapter. As mentioned above, everything is hot-pluggable as well.

Bozo, we've talked about this SAS/SATA topic around here before -- trust me. :wink:

 

[timwhit]

This is the response I received from Adaptec:

Thank you for your order for an Adaptec product. Unfortunately, due to the overwhelming response to this product, we have exceeded our current inventory and your order has a backorder status.

We expect to receive inventory within the next two weeks and should be able to ship your order shortly thereafter. We sincerely apologize for the delay. You will receive a separate email confirmation when the order ships.

If you should have any questions or wish to cancel your order, please call us at 1-800-773-1619 or 408-848-2461 and reference your order number. Alternatively, you may respond to this email or contact us at onlineorders@adaptecstore.com.

Thank you again for your interest in our company and products.

It looks like I will be getting it eventually. We'll see.

 

[JKKJ]

I got the same reply from Adaptec a few days ago.

They just called me up, I thought to verify that I was a "qualified" person. I was expecting to lose the deal, as we're not in the computer business, and don't buy masses of computers, but they just wanted to let me know that there was still a backorder and to ask if I wanted a partial-shipment or to wait for the complete order.

Looks like I'll have a new storage setup soon too.

 

[MaxBurn]

I am not a big decision maker for the systems we use but I sure can put a bug in the customers ear. I am going to try for the deal, hopefully my work email and credit card will make things look legit.

 

[timwhit]

It doesn't seem like they care who orders it. I didn't use any work information and my order went through fine.

 

[MaxBurn]

Woh bit of a correction there, those are 36Gig drives (ST336754SS), not 73Gig (ST373454SS) as above.


Pricewatch prices, non-reputable dealers:
$273 - Seagate ST336754SS x2
$363 - Adaptec 2180800
-------------------------------------
$909 - Total


Still not to bad

 

[JKKJ]

Yeah, it's still a good deal. Best I could find up here was CAD 1015, USD 860ish.
This deal will be around CAD 670 including shipping, and if I'm lucky, customs might miss the taxes (one can always hope.)

 

[MaxBurn]

I just got the call from Naudia (sp?) from Adaptec, aparntly the adaptor is the part that is backordered and they will go ahead and ship the disks now. The adaptor should be backordered for about two weeks.

 

[JKKJ]

I received a (paper) letter in the mail (slot) today too repeating the original email confirmation in Timwhit's quote. Sheesh. Is this much contact normal from Adaptec Customer Care?

I hope nobody shows up at the front door tomorrow morning....

 

[timwhit]

I got the letter too. As well as a phone call and several emails.

 

[Explorer]

Woh bit of a correction there, those are 36Gig drives (ST336754SS), not 73Gig (ST373454SS) as above.

Whoa Nelly! Not sure why I pasted pricing info on a 73 GB ST373454SS. I think I was still suffering the effects of jetlag.

In any case, I received said package from Adaptec on Tuesday (my Tuesday here in GMT -600). I was able to briefly check out the operation of the host bus adapter and the 2-each 36 GB SAS drives last night (more on this below).

First of all, a couple of things of note:

1.) You better have a PCI 2.2 for this Adaptec Adaptec 48300 SAS host bus adapter to plug into, otherwise it will be a no-go situation as the PCI slot keying will NOT allow you to plug this card into an old-school 5-volt PCI slot. You MUST have a 3.3-volt PCI slot available (32-bit or 64-bit). Any PCI-X slot will work.

Left Side Is Back Of Computer


2.) The packaging idiots at Adaptec managed to ship the SAS HBA and the two drives loose in a typical sort of cardboard shipping box that you would only be suitable for shipping software or PCI cards -- not hard drives! There was a couple of small air pillows in the box, but still, everything was too loose inside, and not a bit of padding in the perimeter. I'm sure the only thing that saved these hard drives from possible destruction were those crafty Seagate clamshell plastic containers Seagate has been using for the past few years to package their half-height hard drives in.


= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =


OK. Not an official test at all, but I can say from low-level formatting both of these drives, then loading WinXP (SP-0), followed by the installation of SP-2 for WinXP that the SAS version of the X15.4 certainly seems noticeably faster than my Ultra320 X15.3! Also, the noise of the X15.4 is very very low -- no worse than a quiet 7200 RPM ATA/SATA drive. After about 30 minutes of nearly non-stop formatting and software installation, I was able to handle a bare X15.4 -- that had simply been laying on top of the chassis without any form of cooling -- without even the slightest hint of hot! The drive was only warm, and slightly warmer on the left and right mounting edges than on any part of the top, bottom, or front surfaces.


More later once I have some time to complete installation. Unfortunately, I don't have any SATA drives to attach to the SAS host bus adapter. I guess my only gripe with this setup is that the SAS HBA takes longer to perform its boot sequence (scan for drives, etc) than I wish it would, which is about 50% longer than my Adaptec 29320 (dual-channel, Ultra 320). Nonetheless, this setup is really fast and quiet!

 

[Explorer]

OK, got rid of the "quote" problem from above....

Woh bit of a correction there, those are 36Gig drives (ST336754SS), not 73Gig (ST373454SS) as above.

Whoa Nelly! Not sure why I pasted in pricing info on a 73 GB ST373454SS. I think I was still suffering the effects of jetlag.

In any case, I received said package from Adaptec on Tuesday (my Tuesday here in GMT -600). I was able to briefly check out the operation of the host bus adapter and the 2-each 36 GB SAS drives last night (more on this below).

First of all, a couple of things of note:

1.) You better have a PCI 2.2 for this Adaptec Adaptec 48300 SAS host bus adapter to plug into, otherwise it will be a no-go situation as the PCI slot keying will NOT allow you to plug this card into an old-school 5-volt PCI slot. You MUST have a 3.3-volt PCI slot available (32-bit or 64-bit). Any PCI-X slot will work.

Left Side Is Back Of Computer


2.) The packaging idiots at Adaptec managed to ship the SAS HBA and the two drives loose in a typical sort of cardboard shipping box that you would only be suitable for shipping software or PCI cards -- not hard drives! There was a couple of small air pillows in the box, but still, everything was too loose inside, and not a bit of padding in the perimeter. I'm sure the only thing that saved these hard drives from possible destruction were those crafty Seagate clamshell plastic containers Seagate has been using for the past few years to package their half-height hard drives in.


= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =


OK. Not an official test at all, but I can say from low-level formatting both of these drives, then loading WinXP (SP-0), followed by the installation of SP-2 for WinXP that the SAS version of the X15.4 certainly seems noticeably faster than my Ultra320 X15.3! Also, the noise of the X15.4 is very very low -- no worse than a quiet 7200 RPM ATA/SATA drive. After about 30 minutes of nearly non-stop formatting and software installation, I was able to handle a bare X15.4 -- that had simply been laying on top of the chassis without any form of cooling -- without even the slightest hint of hot! The drive was only warm, and slightly warmer on the left and right mounting edges than on any part of the top, bottom, or front surfaces.


More later once I have some time to complete installation. Unfortunately, I don't have any SATA drives to attach to the SAS host bus adapter. I guess my only gripe with this setup is that the SAS HBA takes longer to perform its boot sequence (scan for drives, etc) than I wish it would, which is about 50% longer than my Adaptec 29320 (dual-channel, Ultra 320). Nonetheless, this setup is really fast and quiet!

 

[sechs]

What's the cabling look like?

 

[MaxBurn]

I was curious about the cabling too, looks similar to to SATA multilane cabling I guess?

Picture in the manual page 23
http://download.adaptec.com/pdfs/installation_guides/SAS_48300_Installation_and_Users_Guide.pdf

Looks like it has built in adapters for regular 4 pin molex power connectors built in.

 

[Explorer]

What's the cabling look like?

Yes, the picture of the multi-lane (internal) cable on page 23 is what it is. For the fashion conscious, the cables use blue insulation.

The multi-lane cable is just long enough to do the job for my overly-long (or deep) Supermicro server case (SC-942 pedestal / rackmount-able chassis).

You don't get an external cable with this promotional bundle. I definitely want to be able to do external SATA, so that I can do jumbo-sized sneakernet transfers and backups to cheap SATA drives with behemoth storage capacity.

PS: Another short day with the system reveals that the speed is pretty damned killer -- seems like it's easily 20% faster than the 36 GB X15.3, and more so under heavy loads. I haven't had a chance to run the Atto benchmark yet, but should by Monday.

 

[MaxBurn]

Thanks for posting your experiences Explorer, good news on the speed, low temp and noise.

Some questions:
What motherboard are you using this in / were you able to put it in a PCI64 or PCI-X slot? Did you switch the drives firmware over to "static segment allocation" For single user performance. Actually I don't know what you are planning them for. Suposedly there is a bit of a difference between static and dynamic allocation for these drives depending on useage:

http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200411/20041116ST3146754LW_1.html



I'm wondering how much my PCI 32-33 is going to bring this down, I don't plan on doing any RAID, just single disks but I have a couple SATA's I'm planning to put on this controller too. Looks like the sustained transfer rate on these drives come close to what PCI 32-33 is capable of.

Hmm, anyone know where I can pick up another cheap Supermicro P4SCT? :mrgrn:

 

[Explorer]

What motherboard are you using this in / were you able to put it in a PCI64 or PCI-X slot?

I'm using the setup with the mobo you just mentioned -- a Supermicro P4SCT+II. The P4SCT+II is nothing more that a P4SCT with a two extra SATA ports and SATA RAID integrated on the mobo -- all of which I've defeated by placing the mobo jumper into position 2, which effectively turns the P4SCT+II into a P4SCT.

Processor is just a garden-variety Northwood Pentium 4 3.0 GHz. RAM is 1 GB. Otherwise, the mobo's PCI slots are all loaded with various cards at the moment, which includes an Adaptec 39320 Ultra320 dual-channel, Firewire+USB2, Matrox RTX.10 video I/O, LynxStudio audio I/O, Acard 2-port ATA-133 card, Matrox P650 AGP, and probably something else that I'm forgetting.

Did you switch the drives firmware over to "static segment allocation" for single user performance. Actually I don't know what you are planning them for...

No, I haven't touched drive firmware or settings within the drive firmware (this would be done with a Seagate SAS utility). Chances are I will get around to setting it to "static" addressing, since I'm not planning on array usage of any sort with these drives. The Adaptec flashes some text on the screen during POST. Some of that is "JBOD" when it identifies my drive. Of course, this has nothing to do with whatever I may (or may not) have done with a group of drives in Windoze XP -- as far as JBOD / Dynamic Disc sets go.

I'm wondering how much my PCI 32-33 is going to bring this down...

As long as do in fact have compatible 32-bit PCI slots (or compatible 64-bit slots; see notes above and compare your slots with illustration to make sure the slot key is towards the rear of the chassis so that it will allow 3.3V operation) it will put a dent in your performance if you plan on using more than 2 drives simultaneously.

The Adaptec card -- and every other card out there like it -- has 8 independent 3 Gb/s data ports. Remember that you have data AND commands in whatever bandwidth you are using. Also, parallel PCI is a shared architecture, which is now not a good thing at all with the sick performance freak-o crowd.

I want to trade up to an AMD64 PCI Express mobo in the next few months. Once I do, I will sell the Adaptec 8-port SAS card and probably get a 4-port or 8-port SAS card for 4-lane PCI Express. It will also need to have at least one external SAS port. More likely, I will just get a PCI Express mobo with embedded SAS (Supermicro already has some; I'm sure Tyan, Asus, and others will also have such soon). Using a mobo with embedded SAS, I will take one or two ports out to an external connector slot bracket in an unused slot on the back of the chassis, where I will plug in SATA (maybe even some SAS) external hard drives or maybe SATA external optical drives.

I don't plan on doing any RAID, just single disks but I have a couple SATA's I'm planning to put on this controller too.

Sounds like "normal" workstation operations. No sweat.

Looks like the sustained transfer rate on these drives come close to what PCI 32-33 is capable of.

It's high, but something like that is only going to occur in peaks on the vast majority of single user workstations. On the other hand, it might be a completely different story with a multi-user server.

Thanks for posting your experiences Explorer, good news on the speed, low temp and noise.

Another thing that I did not mention is that the seek sound of both of these SAS drives (low in audibility as they are) is significantly different that SCSI and ATA drives.

Just listening to the seek sound it seems obvious that these drives are not working as "hard" as other drives do. There isn't that extreme thick "clicky" sound when activity gets intense. Instead, I hear more of a mild "woody" sound at worse. Running the XP Disc Defragmenter tool, extreme accessing activity is a pleasant and very low volume sort of "woody" sound. By the way, this is with the bare drive laying on the chassis right in front of my face! I'm sure it will be even quieter once I mount it inside the chassis and close the chassis.

I suspect a lot of the quietness is the direct result of the efficient and capable SAS drive firmware -- coupled with the ferrari-like full-duplex hardware -- that makes for significantly more intelligent read/write patterns than you normally encounter with legacy SCSI and ATA. This is data that's filling large full-duplex SAS queues and buffers for the multi-tasking multi-threaded operating system to feast on as fast as it can.


~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~


I will be incommunicado for the next few days, probably returning on Tuesday or Wednesday of next week. I might be able to play around some more with my new SAS-sy rig tonight, but then I won't for a while after tonight. Errrr... that's it in a nutshell.

 

[Explorer]

...Did you switch the drives firmware over to "static segment allocation" For single user performance. Actually I don't know what you are planning them for. Suposedly there is a bit of a difference between static and dynamic allocation for these drives depending on useage...

I used the Seagate tool to set the buffer/cache in one of my SAS hard drives (the one with WinXP loaded on it) from the default Server mode to Workstation (static) mode. There was also 3 levels of AAM (acoustics) that you could select. The default AAM settting was "off," where it stayed -- the drive is very quiet as it is.

I ran the Atto benchmark again (drive in "static" workstation mode) and sho'nuff, the bar charts jumped up a few MB/s pretty much all the way around!

But, to be quite honest, I could not detect any real difference in a general "seat of the pants" test drive. Applications like Acrobat and Word opening large documents seemed the same as before, which leads me to think that my Pentium 4 3.0 GHz processor is more of a bottleneck than the hard drive and its controller! As a side note: I actually have 2.0 GB of RAM; this is very fast Corsair XMS (I think it's called) RAM.

I still have not spent any appreciable time with the system and its new SAS-sy hard drives. I'll try to post benchmarks screens soon.

 

[sechs]

This appears to come with a fan cable. Do you have to have the octopus flailing around your case, or are able to use only the cables that you need?

 

[Explorer]

This appears to come with a fan cable. Do you have to have the octopus flailing around your case, or are able to use only the cables that you need?

Yes, it came with the only internal cable that's available for this HBA -- which is a breakout cable. Otherwise, the medusa-like cable really isn't much to deal with, as you can tie the unused cables into sort of a loose knot and locate them out of the way. If worse came to worse, one could simply snip off the unused breakout cables flush with the large multi-pin connector that plugs into the SAS HBA.



~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

QUICKIE BENCHMARKS AHEAD (Atto Benchmark):

• 
  
  
  
  
  
  36 GB Seagate Cheetah X15.3 Ultra 320 (parallel) SCSI
  
  
  
  
  
  36 GB Seagate X15.4 SAS, Performance Mode = OFF (default setting for server useage)
  
  
  
  
  
  36 GB Seagate X15.4 SAS, Performance Mode = ON
  
  
  
  
  
  Seatools Drive Preferences Setup -- First tab
  
  
  
  
  
  Seatools Drive Preferences Setup -- Second Tab
  

 

[MaxBurn]

Anyone been contacted that their backordered stuff is on the way?

 

[timwhit]

Not yet. Maybe I should just cancel my order and not worry about it.

 

[JKKJ]

Haven't heard anything either. It's only been 2 weeks, with Christmas in the middle though, so I'll continue to wait.

 

[sechs]

FYI, received a message today saying two weeks... but it looked awfully canned.

I'm sure that we're just waiting on a shipment from Asia to come in.

 

[sechs]

FYI II:

Called Adaptec today about the backorder situation. The person to whom I talked said that my backorder was due to a lack of drives.

If you received drives and no card, I curse at you. You should expect a card to ship to you this week.

 

[MaxBurn]

The CS droids might not know what's back ordered, or it keeps changing. When they called me after I placed my order to tell me it was out of stock they offered to ship the drives. They never did of course so I emailed them to ask about that and they replied it makes no sense to split ship as you can't use either, and I didn't argue the point.

I might cancel the end of next week if I don't have a shipping status, it's a lot of money to just have pending. But I want those drives, you know?

FYI: I have been keeping track of these components on ebay and they really are not selling. Looks like it's just too soon for any demand an SAS stuff. If you were thinking on dumping these on ebay you might want to think about that and do some research first...

 

[sechs]

Wouldn't be surprising if they were misinformed. I'm not holding my breath.

 

[timwhit]

I cancelled my order earlier today. I had checked on eBay and didn't really see them selling too well either.

 

[Fushigi]

I'm putting in an IBM xSeries 366 right now. Quad Xeon 3.6, 16GB RAM, Windows 2003 Enterprise + VMWare. It has 6 10K 73GB 2.5" SAS drives on an IBM ServeRAID card. Sucker takes forever and a day to boot but is darned fast otherwise.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure whose drives they are and I also won't be able to benchmark their performance. But they do appear to be speedy little suckers. Configured as a single RAID5 set as we needed maximum capacity more than we needed additional redundancy.

And no, I won't be able to run Folding on it.

 

[Handruin]

Are you running VMware GSX server on that? Why not ESX server, you would see more performance out of it (unless you need windows for other tasks).

 

[Fushigi]

Are you running VMware GSX server on that? Why not ESX server, you would see more performance out of it (unless you need windows for other tasks).

Good question; GSX (Unlimited Processor edition). It was set up that way as we may need to ditch the internal disk in favor of one of these. It's an adapter that goes in the xSeries server & provides several functions. The main function is the adapter joins the 2 GBps (byte, not bit) link between iSeries frames and allows it to share iSeries resources (disk, tape, optical, Ethernet). We also gain the ability to do some management functions like powering off & on from the iSeries so our ability to do remote management is enhanced.

The IxA is not currently compatible with ESX. However, if we use the IxA I can carve out as much of the iSeries disk as I want and it'll be running over 36 disk arms (with a lot more cache) vs. just 6. This is good as we're discovering that 350GB probably isn't enough for our needs. So we'll probably set it up with just a few sessions now and re-fit it with the IxA later.