Difference between Adaptec 19160 and 29160N controllers

lemonlime

I looked around for some information, but all I could find was that the 29160N had greater operating system flexability. I own both cards, and they look physically identical. Anyone know of any other differences?

Also, does anyone have any suggestions for a good 64-bit u160/320 raid card that does not break the bank ?

Thrax

In the distance, a tumbleweed is blown by a dusty breeze across the span of unpaved road. The sun is high in the sky, and the breeze is warm, but there aren't any people left on the decks of the saloons.

It's high noon in S-M town, and Tex is comin' to educate the masses on RAID.

Tex

The differance in the two controllers? And you have them both?

One has two u160 internal channels (the hd68 ones) and one has one. Hence 19160 (one channel) and 29160 (two channels)

scsi raid..... u160 or u320? Huge differnace in price. u160 technology has been around much longer and the market for used controllers is stronger because companies upgraded to the newer u320 spec. A decent used one depending on how its rigged (how much cache and if its got a battery etc) will run ya $130 to $210 on eBay. Look for Elite 1600's or Dell Perc3/DC's for a two channel. Same controller. LSI OEM'd them to dell and others. If you go the eBay route let me help locate you a good one. Lots of land mines and trash to avoid. I buy and sell scsi drives and controllers as a sideline of sorts. But I don't have any Elites right now for sale. There is HUGE differances in the performance between differant makes and models. In the last two years I have had like 10 differant dual cpu boards. Asus a7m266-d's (three total) msi k7d's (four total) one I still have. One dual p3 with 64/66 slots and one dual 2.0ghz Xeons with PCI-x, and I also still have a dual opteron msi k8d with a very very fast u320 raid controller. I build dual cpu servers just for the 64bit slots to install raid controllers. The u320 one in the dual opteron for example is possibly the fastest you can buy today. Its got a half a GB of pc3200 DDR cache onboard and will take a single 1gb stick of DDR cache. You can probably find benchmarks I have posted here from both the LSI 1600 series which was u160 as well as my LSI u320 one in my opteron dualie here in the forums or feel free to email me. I have benchmarks of single drive through 8 drive setups ona number of differant controllers.

Now how much is too much money anyway? Do we need to talk about u320 options? Or were you looking more for the $150 to $200 range? What kind of drives and how many do you have and that will help me make a recomendation.

Tex

lemonlime

I had the 19160 for few months, and when I bought the three drives, there was a controller included, so I got the 29160N with them. I thought it may be a 2-channel card as well, but it is indeed single channel, and is identical in construction to the 19160.. Thought that was kind of weird. There are other 29160 models, including a 64bit version, but the one I have is a 32bit model, looks identical to the 19160.

As far as the raid controller, the 100-200 dollar range is probably where I'm looking. U160 would be fine. Keep me in mind if you see anything good. The drives are kind of old unfortunatly, but I'm also keeping an eye out for something newer. I have a pair of Atlas 10KII's 18.2 and a Atlas IV 9.1

Thanks,
Mike

Tex

In that price range you want a Elite 1600 with 128mb ram. The controller is a little dated when used with state of the art drives as the cache and cpu have a hard time keeping up for pure STR it can be easily overwhelmed and you have to basicaly turn teh cache off to get peak STR. With those drives it would work great with the cache enabled. Even using the drives non raided on that controller they get a HUGE boost from the 128mb cache in most normal desktop functions.

I almost always have drives available unless your looking for 73 or 146gb drives. I get those from time to time but thats not normal.

Heres what your shooting for.

First one is a single Atlas 10k IV

second one is four Atlas 10k III's.

Third is a single 10k III

Last is the new faster u320 raid controller

Tex

And that last one... was a single drive using the 512mb DDR cache