Our problems started early, when the first card Adaptec sent refused to connect to the switch at Gigabit Ethernet speeds. After calling Adaptec repeatedly and fiddling with the drivers and the new BIOS config utility, we received two more cards. The second card installed correctly, but refused to recognize or even reformat the existing partitions on our RAID 5 LUNs. Finally, the third card brought success--but not before we had reformatted the partition with the Adaptec card and reloaded the data.
The GUI is a substantial improvement over the former command-line interface, but strangely, Adaptec's documentation still insists that you load iConfig.exe, though the program doesn't exist. From a performance standpoint, the Adaptec did well, winning the read tests and a few others; but its overall performance still came in second, just ahead of QLogic. CPU utilization for the 7211C was consistently low but not quite as low as QLogic's.
Pricing placed this card in the middle of the pack as well, but the difficulties we experienced in setup and configuration caused it to finish third. In fairness to Adaptec, the vendor was extremely responsive. Aside from those setup problems, the Adaptec card is a stable performer.
ASA-7211C iSCSI HBA, $559. Adaptec, (408) 945-8600. www.adaptec.com
Steven Hill owns and operates ToneCurve Technology, a digital imaging consulting company. Write to him at [email protected].
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