Home EnterpriseAttached Storage PMC Adaptec Series 7H and 6H families of SAS/SATA HBAs Announced

PMC Adaptec Series 7H and 6H families of SAS/SATA HBAs Announced

by Lyle Smith

PMC has announced the industry’s first high-performance, high density, low-profile encrypted PCIe Gen3 host bus adapter (HBA) family to further expand its Adaptec storage product-line. PMC’s new HBA family is capable of executing over one million IOPS with 6.6 GB/s sustained throughput, provides 256 bit AES encryption, and offers up to 16 ports. The Adaptec Series 7H and 6H families of SAS/SATA HBAs offer users high-performance connectivity for HDDs, SSDs, removable media, and tape drives and is specifically designed for high performance data center applications.


PMC has announced the industry’s first high-performance, high density, low-profile encrypted PCIe Gen3 host bus adapter (HBA) family to further expand its Adaptec storage product-line. PMC’s new HBA family is capable of executing over one million IOPS with 6.6 GB/s sustained throughput, provides 256 bit AES encryption, and offers up to 16 ports. The Adaptec Series 7H and 6H families of SAS/SATA HBAs offer users high-performance connectivity for HDDs, SSDs, removable media, and tape drives and is specifically designed for high performance data center applications.

Adaptec Series 7H HBAs feature PMC’s 16-port PM8018 6GB/s I/O controller silicon as well as an x8 PCIe Gen3 interface. They are the industry’s first to achieve over 1 million IOPS with 512 byte blocks, and can execute more than 800,000 IOPS with 4K blocks. Additionally, its built-in support for MSI-X gives adapters the ability to leverage multi-core host CPUs, which boosts application performance. As a result, this allows customers to utilize the full potential of SSDs, enabling a host of low-latency applications.

With its 16 SAS/SATA ports, the PCIe Gen3 interface doubles the bandwidth to the host when compared to the previous generation. The Adaptec Series 7H HBAs are also the industry’s first to use mini SAS HD connectors, which offer up to 16 native SAS/SATA ports in a low-profile MD2 form factor–ideal for high-density servers.

The Adaptec Series 7He HBAs includes Adaptec maxCrypto security technology: a 256 bit AES, in-line encryption engine enabled with a unique hardware encryption key.

maxCrypto features and benefits

  • Hardware key that ships as part of the 7He Series
  • Devices will have a unique encryption key generated during manufacturing
  • No risk of customer data exposure
  • If the maxCrypto device is destroyed, data on the drives becomes unreadable
  • No key management expertise, or key management software required
  • Not accessible from outside the server

Adaptec Series 6H HBAs takes advantage of PMC’s 8-port PM8001 6GB/s I/O controller silicon and x4 PCIe Gen2 interface to provide cost-efficient HBA solutions rated at more than 250,000 IOPS with 512 byte blocks and more than 200,000 IOPS with 4K blocks. Additionally, with its low-profile MD2 form factor, the Series 6H HBAs can fit into x4/x8/x16 PCIe slots and are available in 4- and 8-port (internal) options using standard mini SAS connectors.

The Adaptec 6H and 7H product lines share common drivers as well as management tools, including drivers for Windows, VMWare, and open-source Linux.

The complete family of Adaptec Series 7 and Adaptec Series 6 HBAs will be available through Adaptec’s worldwide Distributors and storage channel partners in Q2 2013.

Product Page

Discuss This Story