In June we wrote an article about Adaptec's new Zero-Maintenance Cache Protection and explained how the company planned to introduce a revolutionary technology that would leave the battery protection behind for good. Two months later Adaptec once again broke new ground and announced their MaxIQ cache system that accelerates data transfers by using Intel solid state drives to increase I/O performance. Both of these high tech features can be used on Adaptec's Series 5 RAID controllers like the 5805Z we are testing today.

You may notice the 5 Series product naming; the series has already been on the market for over a year but the Z models are updated with the new cache protection system. You can expect to spend around 500 USD for the standard drive without a battery and close to 800 for the Z Series RAID 5805(Z) according to PriceGrabber. The MaxIQ Upgrade Kit is also on the market already, but the price is a bit more significant. Look to spend around 1,100 Dollars for this add-on that is capable of boosting performance 10x as long as your data is able to fit into the "Hot Zone". In the coming weeks we will have the additional MaxIQ hardware in house to test some scenarios that will see performance increases and a few that don't. We will also answer the question, Will this increase the performance of my system?

The only feature that the Adaptec 5805Z does not have a filled checkbox for is SAS 6 GB/s, second generation Serial Attached SCSI. With Seagate and other drive manufacturers releasing these next generation enterprise drives, I was a bit surprised to see Adaptec choosing to release such an impressive feature rich controller and forgoing SAS 2.0.

Let's take a look at the full specifications list of the Adaptec 5805Z and get into testing the new controller with a set of Seagate 15K.7 drives and then fill the controller with eight Seagate 7200.11 1TB drives.