A family of series 6 RAID controllers from PMC-Sierra are designed for high I/O transaction and high bandwidth processing applications. The Adaptec series 6 family is based on the company's multi-core SRC 8x6G RAID-on-chip controller and is claimed to be the industry's 6Gbit/s unified serial RAID controller channel controller with zero-maintenance cache protection which reduces operating costs and minimises environmental impact. The controllers support up to 256 SATA/SAS devices using SAS expanders and an eight-lane PCIe Gen 2 host interface bus connection. The controllers offer a 60% higher sustained sequential throughput than previous generations of Adaptec controllers. They deliver up to 2Gbyte/s sustained data transfer rate and 4.8Gbyte/s through the SAS 2.0 interfaces and 4Gbyte/s through the PCIe Gen 2 host interface delivering enough bandwidth for high streaming applications, such as editing and broadcasting uncompressed 3D video streams. For example, a 14Tbyte array used as a virtual tape library can be filled in less than two hours compared to previous generation interfaces that take more than three hours. With zero-maintenance cache protection the need to replace Lithium Ion batteries is eliminated. The controllers also have intelligent power management, claimed to reduce storage power and cooling costs by up to 70%.
