Adaptec 2400A

Gimme a foot long
Adaptec's 2400A is huge. Sitting at just over a foot long, it's the kind of card that could cause fit problems in even spacious cases, so you'd better break out that measuring tape before considering this one. The 2400A does pack a lot onto its ample PCB real estate, so let's take a closer look.

First, a picture of the card to give you an idea of just how huge this thing really us. If you move your case around a lot, or even if you don't, you're probably going to want to stabilize the end of the card, since the PCB extends well beyond the PCI slot and back plate anchoring points.

Such a large PCB gives Adaptec plenty of room for the 2400A's four IDE channels, each of which can accept a single ATA/100 hard drive. (The card is compatible with ATA/133 drives, but it throttles their performance to ATA/100 speeds.)

The 2400A sports what looks like a whole lot like a Socket 423 Pentium 4 chip, but don't worry, the 2400A isn't a dumping ground for surplus Intel desktop processors. Intel does make the ASIC used in the 2400A, which explains the chip's packaging, but don't expect the 2400A to support Hyper-Threading, NetBurst, or SSE2.

As you can see, the 2400A also sports a standard 168-pin DIMM slot for its upgradeable cache memory. The card ships with a 32MB PC100 ECC DIMM, but you can swap in your own DIMM to get up to 128MB of cache if you so desire. Unfortunately, the list of supported DIMM modules seems rather short, and our 128MB PC133 ECC DIMM didn't work in the 2400A at all.

When we tried the 128MB PC100 ECC DIMM in the 2400A, the card's status and error LEDs put on a little light show. The LEDs will let you get array status, activity, and error information directly from the card if you're unable to boot into the card's BIOS or get all the way into Windows and use the included RAID array management software. As an added bonus, the lights sometimes flash in a side-to-side in a pattern reminiscent of Knight Rider's KITT. That alone makes it tempting to throw a case window into that server, doesn't it?

Adaptec has been doing the RAID thing for a while, so they have some pretty complete array management software shipping with the 2400A. Adaptec's software feels more polished than what's shipping with the other cards we've looked at, and that may be because Adaptec uses the same software for its high-end SCSI RAID products. All in all, its main features aren't wildly different from the competition.