Clever, clever Adaptec

Wrapping a green cloak around its shoulders Adaptec has impressively extended its RAID controllers' capabilities by making them spin down disk drives as well. It's also joined the Green Grid, the IT industry's data centre greening group. All Adaptec Series 2 and 5 RAID controllers can now send messages to disk drives telling …

[Anonymous Coward]

Errr - "Clever" ??

Where do you get the idea that Adaptec is clever ?

You report it made a loss for fiscal 2008 - the company has made huge losses for the last 4 - 5 years and their current revenues are about 1/10th of what they were.

As for the purchase of of Aristos, have you realised that this is at least the 5th RAID company Adaptec have bought ? What happened to the people and skills of all the others ? Adaptec's workforce shrinkage (about 75% total, in Europe about 97%) means that as a supposed RAID company Adaptec no longer had internal R&D (let alone maintenance) skills.

This looks like a purchase forced on Adaptec by Steel Partners who last year thought they were investing in a RAID company - then found out they'd been scammed.

Little tweaks of technology like this are all that's left to Adaptec. They've completely lost the RAID on motherboard business, they have zero OEM business and their once impeccable reputation in the industry is now lower than Gordon Brown's popularity.

[Anonymous Coward]

So green is a verb now...

...has the CEO been 'greened' in that pic? Or is he waiting to be green-screened into somewhere that would give him a good reason for that slightly disturbing maniacal smile?

[KarlTh]

@Christopher P. Martin

Verbing weirds language. (Bill Waterson)

[David Shepherd]

@KarlTh

Stop it immediately - don't verb nouns

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't Buy Adaptec

The OpenBSD project now recommends not using Adaptec controllers. The reason is that Adaptec have flatly refused to release information so that a properly working RAID driver can be written. The current driver is buggy and can't do things like interrogating the health of the array, and Adaptec refuse to release information that would allow this to be done.

What's the point of making hardware if you won't let the software guys work with it?

Ref: http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#38

[Chris Mellor]

Green as a (weird) verb

Chambers doesn't list 'green' as a verb but HyperDic does:- http://www.hyperdic.net/dic/green.htm#v3000. Mr Sundaresh's image was Photoshopped into having a green background. The smile is original.

Chris.

[Chris Mellor]

Adaptec and Gordon Brown

Adaptec's past reputation is dire, you are very right there. I have a feeling in m'vitals that a tide may be turning though. 1 + 1 may make 3 in this case. Could be wrong of course. We'll see.

Chris.

[Mark Lockwood]

@KarlTh

Surly verbing evolves language.

We do have to be careful though, else we'll be stuck with such abominations as lappy and mobe.

I feel a vote coming on....

[Thom Brown]

No series 3?

I noticed that they're only supporting this on lowest and highest end cards. Why not the 3 series mid-range? They don't even mention it nor explain what it is about the 2 and 5 series that makes them capable of supporting it over the 3 series.

[Daniel]

so when ...

... do we get computers that actually stop the clock when no processes are doing anything?

apart from the RTC that is.

[Christian Berger]

Wouldn't it be better...

Wouldn't it be better to just improve the bearings? I mean if you shut down your drives and restart them again you will easily wear out the motors.

[KarlTh]

@Mark Lockwood

Verbing evolves language whether it's surly or cheerful.

[Steve]

@Daniel

Stopping the clock? Why bother with the clock at all: http://research.sun.com/features/async/

[Gary A]

The Register ranks #1 for storage news

Don't know if you saw this or not - pretty cool:

http://blogs.storagemonkeys.com/index.php/2008/09/the-top-10-storage-news-and-information-web-sites/