Episode: 3584
Title: HPR3584: The collective history of RAID controller brands
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3584/hpr3584.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 01:46:21

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3584 for Thursday the 28th of April 2022.
Today's show is entitled The Collective History of Raid Controller Brands.
It is hosted by JWP and is about 18 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is The Story of Raid Cards 1999 to Present.
Good day.
I'm JWP and I would like to talk to you today about the collective history of Raid Controller Brands.
The market segment of Raid Adapters has a long history and tradition.
It's undergone gradual concentration followed by an upstream of mergers of the own incorporations,
a feeding frenzy of sorts among the semiconductor manufacturers.
I thought about it for a while and a friend of mine came up with a chart and when he did
this I said wow and he wrote an article and I thought about it and I said well how long
have I been doing this?
Most of my life I've been using these Raid controllers or HBA controllers for hard disk
and different server technologies and memory slips over 20-30 years of doing this.
It was good for him to make a picture and it was great for me to read it and I thought
about how much of my life I spent doing this.
I put a link in the thing from his notes about this and it has a picture.
It's pretty comprehensive so you might want to look at the picture.
I'll try to describe it for you, circle-wise as I go through it and then I'll consider
the history.
It all pretty much started with a company called Mylux and in 1999 or September of 1999 their
Axel Raid technology was acquired by IBM.
Another company called AMI had a technology called Megarete and in September of 2001 they
were purchased by a company called LSI and a company called Three Wear which had a technology
called Escalade was purchased by a company called AMCC.
Now all three of these technologies converged into a company called LSI so IBM sold theirs
in 2009 of 2002 and AMCC did their investment in April of 2009 and then LSI kept the primary
thing that kept was the Megarete of branding and they became Avago and Avago with the Megarete
labeling did a merger in February of 2016 and they were by far the leader and they rebranded
under the name Broadcom.
Okay so the second family is the DDP ICP family and the DDP their technology was called
I2O Raid and ICP their technology was called Bortex and so DDP was acquired in 11 of
1999 by a company called Adaptic and almost everyone knows about Adaptic and then ICP with
their Bortex technology was acquired in March of 2001 by Intel.
Now Intel divested ICP Bortex in 2006 of 2003 so it was a really short life for the Raid
controller there and then Adaptic, well they have their own advanced Raid or what they
call ACC Raid and the Adaptic ACC Raid adapter was purchased by PMCC era in June of 2010.
And they kept the Adaptic labeling and ACC Raid and in January of 2016 a company called
MicroSemi bought the Adaptic technology from PMCC era and then later keeping the Adaptic
ACC Raid thing in May of 2018 a company called Microchip purchased them.
So if you have any idea about the hardware shortages and the computer industry today so you
can't give very much microchip right now so you got to go with the Broadcom.
So both Adaptic and LSI sold their adapters under their own brand via retail stores but
also to volume and large OEM such as HP Dell IBM Lenovo Fujitsu Intel branded Raid cards can
be LSI historically ICP Bortex under the hood. Evidently throughout the history there have
been several firmware strands or code bases and for practical purposes the firmware strand
is a key selection criteria that if you're interested in when shopping for a Raid card or
when trying to make one work. From what I just described currently the remaining strands
appear to be Mega Raid and ACC Raid each getting new models introduced as the technical illusion
move on. The clearest way for you to know what pedigree the Raid card has a hand is probably
to insert it into a PC running a modern Linux issue or a recent free BSD and see what driver
get floated for hardware currently in storage you may need a fresh kernel possibly of an
Ella kernel compiled from source with all the Raid driver modules. Okay so that's that's
an interesting alternatively you can try downloading the Windows card for the marketing name
that you can see and the e-shop on pack download the 7-zip until you get your hands on a pair
of files with this in our F extensions. The NAFS is a text group that tends to be kind of
human readable and if you haven't found out the following yet the NFS header will probably
disclose a true pedigree of a card. Okay so in this case Wikipedia is really really your
friend. It's always got a rich source of memorial pages or companies that no longer exist
but even Wikipedia doesn't have them all and companies are still alive have a proper
website of their own. Mylaks AMC AMCC's last three were LSI logic Avago which is now
4.com which which is X Agilent XP. Wow. Adaptic. DDP PMC Sierra, Micro Semi, Microchip, AARCA,
Infotrend, Accusative, Fugitive, Extremist DX family and of course LMC has a huge thing.
So after each of the early acquisitions the surviving brand used to sell
ray control mallers with different firmware strains for a while and that's in what's
nice is typically the strain with the more practical unit phrases that long term features
survived in the long term. Okay so so when they bought it if it had a better easier look better
simpler it usually went out. So I don't know if anyone remembers a horror of ZCR by
Adaptic the 2010 to 2015 being the DPP DPP slash I20 pedigree and later modules in 2020 slash
2025 being the ACC pedigree. By the time the DPP CER cards felt a little stale and the ACC
GR cards had a more useful firmware but it turned out both strains probably suffered from a
systematic hardware problem on motherboards at the time. So they all used that AIC 7902
adapter or what we would call the Adaptic U320 SCSI HBA chips and so these were embedded on the
motherboard and they had a glitch against the server work chips that on those same motherboards
on the PCA box and so no matter what the CER was installed all of them would freeze
under stress. So if you had like a low run end it would work fine and if you hit it really hard
it would it would it would break and the solutions would either pick pick the pick a motherboard
with the Intel server chipset and they could have several works or buy a full fledger eight card
which is probably exactly what what these guys wanted in the first place was. So you got a case
of it with the built-in motherboard chipset. We didn't attend that for really hard work so you
go ahead and divide this expensive expensive PCA card. So that was more or less the the Intel
IOPE SOC had its own HBA chips to provide a private SOC then they wouldn't come in contact with
a server work chipset and the motherboard. So that's that's how they worked out it. But
so let's talk a little bit about LSI. LSI and got purchased inherited or purchased their
scuzzy HBI's silicon know-how or intellectual property from NCR using something called
Symbiles. So I never knew that Symbiles was NCR but it is in the LSI camp they used the U 160
and the U 320 scuzzy typically worked just fine as long as you had the cabling alright. So all
of these things had cabling. So it just makes you so grateful for the NVME technology that we're
doing today because if you got the cabling on with us it didn't work it didn't work at all.
And so many other way controllers, brands of this area, Infotrans A-R-E-C-A, Accuseth,
were using target mode HBH chips by LSI. I can remember a time when my Alexa DAC 960 descended
from the acceltade raid and mega raid were both available under the LSI brand for brief period of time
and the mega raid was significantly more comfortable to use and more powerful.
So you had to know what you were looking for in the store and later for a while,
three where models were suddenly available under the LSI brand.
The ICP Vortex GDT raid adapters used to have a fairly nice bios menu and a straightforward
firmware and after the acquisition by Adaptec I recall some Vortex cards being sold under
Adaptec brands. But looking at the listing of models and the ACC family I can also see some
ICP Vortex branded cards maybe even pretty modern ones which seems pretty weird.
Adaptec Broadcom are trying to capitalize on the ICP Vortex brand on the German market maybe.
So if you've ever gone thrifting in Germany and
pulled in the look that used old computers, you'll find that ICP Vortex.
So a good overview of the history is available
in the CE source code from Linux drivers for the various raid controller strength.
Just try to find a table of PCI ID supported. Typically it's common as in showing the
controller's marketing names but sometimes their internal code names. A good keyword search for
is struck this struck FTR UCT PCI underscore device underscore ID and that will get you where
you need to go. So maybe a few words about the silicon side of things.
On the chips that all raid controllers are based on. The early Adaptec ACC models and the LSI
APH chips chips chips were a power CPU a power PC CPU and an Intel
so need DEC PCI bridge. This was the error of the compact smart array 4200 probably and
probably still the adaptic ASR 5400S. Later adaptic raid cards had adaptic owned HBA chips.
So for instance AIC 7899 the U160 and Intel IOP CPU originally with the I960 risk core
and later with the ARM core. The raid controller vendors were simply we're using similar
component base. For some years Intel with the dominating the raid controller market CPUs with
IOPs processors to the extent that the CPU was becoming the bottleneck. Only some high-end enterprise
raid controllers were based on X86 processors. About the time the SAS arrived things were starting
to change. AMCC brought their sock with a dual power PC CPU power PC CPU and other foundries
followed with a plethora of sock slash rock chips to typically with multi-channel SAS HBA integrated
LSI, Marvel, Avago, VATs, Broadcom, Scenes Ring of Bell. There were probably some mergers too
and then of course the ASIC IP core transfers and startups instead. Nowadays it may be difficult
to find out the silicon pedigree of a rock and someone's raid controller adapter and none
and no one's very interested really because things just work and low-end raid adapters
are no longer the rage of the day. For ARM premise IT it's no longer the raid on on premise IT
is no longer the rage of the cloud has made everything on premise feel guilty and backward, right?
So the massive cloud infrastructures themselves have hardly used any dedicated raid adapters.
The storage back-end consists of point HBA is interfacing with bulky flows that he drives
or NVME attached flash, JBOD style and everything on the top is software dedicated
learning on cheap multi-core CPUs with an ocean of RAM, communicating on ethernet, TCI-PD,
HTTP or JSON. So dedicated raid controllers are struggling to survive in
an issue as industrial process, Nicole PCs, video editing, workplaces or miscellaneous
die-hard on premise interposable systems operated by graveyard admins who generally
who turn gradually into punk by the cloudy world speeding by.
Alright, here I hope you enjoyed this. Please drop me a note if you have any questions.
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