Conclusion:
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The balancing point of cost verses performance may lead most users to spend their limited budgets on a solid state drive that have a small storage space foot print. This option of course would mean the PC user would have to swap out the game of the month to have enough disk space and the closest any home user may come to RAID is maybe setting up a mirror (RAID 1) in order to ensure they don’t lose their precious photos, videos and other files due to a hard drive failure. The committed PC enthusiast may likely mess around with the on-board RAID to achieve slightly better access times without having to spend much money than to purchase an additional hard drive or two. The entry level Adaptec 6805E is a $230 card at the time of this review and according to the results of the benchmarks we provided above is worth every penny in most cases. Now you may not get solid state speeds, but you will obtain a much larger storage space foot print with much better data access times over a spindled drive connected to the motherboard at much more manageable price per gigabyte. The 6805E supporting multiple hard drives at up to 6GB/s is very attractive and the fact you can move this card from motherboard to motherboard is also something worth making a note of for those of you who upgrade your system often. The only draw backs we could see with the 6805E card were the fact it didn’t support RAID 5 and there isn’t a model with anything more then 128MB cache memory on-board. With the price of RAM becoming so cheap at the time of this review, I’d be willing to spend an extra few dollars to upgrade the 128MB to 512MB or more. Next we will be reviewing the Adaptec 6805TQ which uses a solid state for caching.
We are using the 6805E controller in a VMWare development setup and it is a reasonably good controller. It would benefit from a bigger cache and the ability to use an SSD for further caching. These are features of other controllers with a considerably bigger price tag though. As it is, the controller does very well on not too random work loads but on purely random IO (like some SQL tasks), it only delivers about 13 mb/s on an otherwise lightly loaded RAID 10 setup. That is not too good. If you are not using VMWare but maybe some Linux setup, you can add your own SSD caching via flashcache (https://github.com/facebook/flashcache/). With a setup like that, you get both redundancy and great performance. On the whole, the controller is certainly preferable to on board SW RAID solutions and such but it could be a lot better too.