CeBIT System builders no longer need to choose between Serial ATA and Serial Attached SCSI when it comes to RAID, claimed Adaptec as it announced a family of five unified serial RAID controllers which support both SATA for capacity and SAS for performance.

The PCI-Express (PCIe) cards make use of the fact that SAS is backwards-compatible with SATA, and come in versions with four, eight, 12 and 16 internal ports, with the latter two being unique in the industry, according to Adaptec. A fifth model has eight external ports with dual path fail-over for redundancy.

The controllers support arrays up to 512TB in size, which sounds a lot now, but won't do in a couple of years, given the rate at which SATA drive capacity is increasing.

All offer the standard RAID classes plus two extra ones - RAID 5EE which adds a hot spare, and RAID 6/60 which can protect against two simultaneous hard drive failures. They also come with management software for provisioning, optimising and re-sizing RAID volumes.

Adaptec said that list pricing for the cards will vary from £189 for the four-port 3405 to £512 for the 16-port 31605. ®