Adaptec AACRaid series

1. Vendor information

Adaptec (​http://www.adaptec.com) card are usually well supported on Linux.
Adaptec supports Linux and provide an opensource kernel driver which has been part of Linux for ages

2. Linux kernel drivers

There is only one drivers to handle all cards:

Driver	Supported cards
aacraid	All Adaptec AACRaid cards

You should not expect any problems with theses drivers which are known to be mature and stable.
We don't know any current Linux distrubtion which miss theses drivers so no additional step should be required to get it working.

Some lspci -nn output examples:

• 02:01.0 RAID bus controller [0104]: Adaptec AAC-RAID ![9005:0285] (rev 01)
• 04:08.1 RAID bus controller [0104]: Dell PowerEdge Expandable RAID Controller 3/Di [1028:000a] (rev 01)

3. Management and reporting tools

No opensource tools for aacraid cards currently exist. However, Adaptec provides a proprietary utility for x86 and x86_64 linux systems.

3.1. arcconf

arcconf is a command line tool to manage and monitor aacraid cards.
Latest version is 5.20.17414, available in Adaptec storage manager applications package.

AVAILABLE IN OUR DEBIAN PACKAGES REPOSITORY FOR BOTH I386 AND AMD64 ARCHITECTURES

3.1.1. Quickstart guide for arcconf

Get first controller config and status

server# arcconf GETCONFIG 1
Controllers found: 1
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Controller information
----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Controller Status                        : Optimal
   Channel description                      : SCSI
   Controller Model                         : PERC 3/Di
[...]
   BIOS                                     : 2.8-0 (6089)
   Firmware                                 : 2.8-0 (6089)
   Driver                                   : 1.1-4 (9999)
   Boot Flash                               : 0.0-0 (0)
[...]
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Logical device information
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Logical device number 1
   Logical device name                      : Noname
   RAID level                               : 5
   Status of logical device                 : Optimal
   Size                                     : 139997 MB
   Stripe-unit size                         : 64 KB
   Write-cache mode                         : Not supported
   Partitioned                              : Yes
   Protected by Hot-Spare                   : No
   Bootable                                 : Yes
   Failed stripes                           : No
[...]
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Physical Device information
----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Channel #0:
      Transfer Speed                        : Ultra160
      Initiator at SCSI ID 7
      Device #0
         Device is a Hard drive
         State                              : Online
         Supported                          : Yes
         Transfer Speed                     : Ultra160
         Reported Channel,Device            : 0,0
         Vendor                             : MAXTOR
         Model                              : ATLASU320_73_SCA
         Firmware                           : B120
         Serial number                      : XXX
         Size                               : 70007 MB
         Write Cache                        : Unknown
         FRU                                : None
         S.M.A.R.T.                         : No
[...]

This command will report all important informations. However, if you want to see (in example) array rebuild status you will have to run:

server# arcconf GETSTATUS 1
Controllers found: 1
   Current operation              : None

Command completed successfully.