Adaptec 1891200 Ata Raid 1200A Kit

I've used this IDE RAID contoller in a number of systems, and it's a good product; it works ok.But... Adaptec doesn't make a 64-bit Windows driver available.If you're considering this product, I'd recommend the Highpoint RocketRAID instead. The products are nearly identical, but Highpoint provides a 64-bit Windows driver on it's web site, and the Highpoint product is cheaper if you shop around.Neither company provides much in the way of tech support.

This is the best IDE RAID solution. Offering striping (level 0), mirroring (level 1), a combination with mirrored striped arrrays (0+1), and "just a bunch of disks" (JBOD), this card allows tons of RAID flexibility at a price very competitive with an ordinary ultra ATA/100 adapter. Note that this is also a low-profile card, but it ships with a standard bracket as well, so you can put it in a 1U rackmount server or a standard desktop. The ease of installation was very nice--just copy the driver files from the included CD to a diskette and then wait for the Windows "Found New Hardware" prompt. You can even download the newest drivers from Adaptec's website and skip the CD entirely.If you want to move your single drive on an already-installed OS to a mirrored-drive configuration, here's how I did it. Leave your single drive hooked up to the current IDE controller and put this card in without any disks attached so that you can let Windows install the drivers. Next, move your drive from the onboard IDE to this card and Windows will boot normally from the new card. Then you can use the included GUI software to make your mirror while the system is running--very handy! The included documentation could be more clear on this point, but Adaptec's phone support is marvelous.Striping, on the other hand, takes a complete reinstallation of the OS. It is wonderfully fast and the onboard RAID controller from Highpoint lets your main CPU relax, even during the most intense disk activity. There have been some good online reviews that benchmark this card near the top--search around for other opinions and come back right here to Amazon[.com] for the best price.The only case where you wouldn't want this card is if you want RAID 5. Sorry, you'll need Adaptec's 2400A adapter, which costs more than 6 times as much as this card. You'd be better off to spend the money on faster, bigger hard drives and just mirror them if you want the fault-tolerant option. Remember, mirroring improves read access substantially, so contrary to some myths out there RAID 1 provides performance as well as redundancy. Enjoy! This is the fourth one of these cards I've purchased and they've been great.

I have been building and using comptuers for 15+ years and this is the hardest piece of hardware I have EVER had to install. I could never get it to work reliably with XP (SP2) or Server 2003 (it would work fine with Win. 2000). I followed the instructions to the letter on the Adaptec site but to no avail. Sometimes my computer (XP) would boot fine, other times it would lock up. I finally gave up and went with software RAID which worked perfectly. Save your money or purchase another card if you are using XP or Server 2003.

Thanks for the instructive review Bababooey!I just wanted to add some things if you are doing RAID 1 using driver 1.3:* Shut down the machine and plug the new, XP drive into the Adaptec card, channel #1. NOTE: I plugged in BOTH of my seagate drives. (I purchased the same drives Bababooey purchased - you can't beat the 5 year warranty and performance). For my install, I couldn't boot until I setup an Array in the Array utility that comes up when you reboot. Seems like this step is missing from Bababooey's desc.* Restart the machine and enter the BIOS ... set the Primary Master IDE Channel to "None"/"Off" and bring up XP (note: leave Secondary IDE settings alone because the CD and DVD drives are on these). The OS should now recognize the hardware as an Adaptec 1200a (instead of the generic Mass Storage device). Install the Adaptec GUI software from the CD. NOTE: My BIOS did this automatically.* Shut down the machine and plug the second hard drive into the Adaptec card, channel #2. NOTE: again, I did this in step 1.* Restart the machine and enter the BIOS ... set the Primary Slave IDE Channel to "None"/"Off" and bring up XP (note: leave Secondary IDE settings alone because the CD and DVD drives are on these). NOTE: Did not need this step, my BIOS updated automatically.* Open the Adaptec GUI (there should be a system tray icon per GUI install) and configure for RAID1 per instructions. Mirroring my 160GB drives took ~2.5 hours. NOTE: I did this from the Array utility that came up when i reboot. If you try to do this with only 1 HD on channel 1, it will say, "you suck, there are not enough drives to continue" Why? Because you need both installed before you can continue. Then I chose CREATE and DUPLICATE, and the rest was the defaults. And now it works great!

I have a Compaq NT4 Server I have tried for two days to install this card. It does not work. NT4 does not recognise the driver on a fresh NT install. Worse still when I plugged hard drives into the card the my origonal raid array (which is rock solid) wasn't reconised as the boot device. Do yourself a favour spend a little extra cash and buy a card that works!