The controller is the AAA-UDMA, a four-channel UDMA/66 RAID controller supporting up to four hard drives in RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0/1, and RAID 5 configurations.
Adaptec touts the fact that this is currently the only ATA controller that supports RAID 5. The RAID 0 results were not terribly encouraging, will the adapter make a comeback with RAID 5? I have read that some SCSI RAID cards are so thoroughly optimized for RAID 5 that they actually perform better with it than with RAID 0. Might this the case with the AAA-UDMA? Let's look at the three-drive RAID 5 numbers:
Answer: no. These are terrible performance numbers. The only good thing I can see in them is the extremely low processor usage. One should expect the parity calculations to have a significant impact on RAID 5 performance compared to RAID 0 (assuming no special RAID 5 optimizations), but this is really a poor showing. As the four-drive RAID 5 numbers will show, adding another drive doesn't help:
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