back to article Adaptec disappearing down rabbit hole

The remnants of adapter company Adaptec, having sold its RAID adapter business to PMC-Sierra, is leaving storage further behind as it becomes a Steele Partners shell for financial operations. Chief financial officer Mary Dotz is to be terminated from her position on 30 September. She'll probably get nine months' salary, a near …

COMMENTS

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Troll

    "capital redeployment and identification of new business operations".

    Patent trolls then...

  2. petur
    Unhappy

    R.I.P. Adaptec

    From the once greatest producer of SCSI cards to nothing...

  3. Hayden Clark Silver badge
    Grenade

    Quick! Download the old stuff!

    If you have any Adaptec kit about, you need to hoover up all the downloads now, before PMT-Sierra bin the product line and the support site.

  4. overloaded
    Dead Vulture

    RIP

    I've still got alot of their raid and scsi products in use, some of them more than over 10 years old and still going strong. Shame what a waste.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    A little sad

    Many happy days spent fitting cards and installing software on various platforms.

    The days of..

    Set jumpers...

    Plug in...

    "Balls, set them wrong!"...

    Shutdown...

    Drive out...

    Change jumpers...

    Put drive back...

    Boot...

    "Balls again, still wrong!"...

    Shutdown...

    repeat....

  6. A Non e-mouse Silver badge

    Why ?

    Why are they doing this, just to get a shell company ?

    Why not just start a new company from square one ? Surely it's gotta be a whole lot cheaper ?

    1. alwarming

      Re: Why?

      Either for any IP still owned or the brand name ("instant recognition" in case they buy some unknown business and release it under "adaptec" banner).

      Given the real estate rates have fallen so much, getting the shell for a free (cheap) lease can't be the reason.

  7. James 85

    AH1542

    I can recall tweaking jumpers on AH1542s years ago to link SCSI devices to PCs and servers. It is not anything to get nostalgic about. There had to be a better way, even then.

    Adaptec just failed to grow, develop and change. The IT industry is littered with the corpses of once large companies that died as competitors flourished around them. Anybody remember Data 100?

    It is not anything to get sad about.

    1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

      @James85

      The AH1542 was an ISA card, and most of the jumper settings were setting the base address and IRQ. There really wasn't a better way, because ISA was a limited architecture never intended for server class systems (too few IRQ lines and no interrupt sharing).

      This was the main reason PCI, MCA EISA and Plug'n'Pray were invented. Definitely not Adaptec's fault. People just remember it more with SCSI cards than anything else, but the same issues were there with sound cards, network cards and a multitude of other adapters that weren't around when the PC was originally thrown together (I deliberately avoid saying 'designed' because I don't think it ever was!)

  8. The Unexpected Bill
    Coat

    That's just too bad...

    Another great hardware company down the drain...or is it?

    If they are really turning into nothing more than a shell, that's a big loss. To this day, there is nothing better than an Adaptec storage controller. I guess quality just doesn't sell when "good enough" will do.

    I'm still running the AHA-1640 (Microchannel) and AHA-1740 (EISA) adapters. The latter runs in a restored Compaq Deskpro/M 386/33 box under FreeDOS. As for the former, it drives an older SCSI ScanJet in a PS/2 Model 90. All these years later, both work like new. (But what would you expect?)

    After having problems with a lot of those combination Firewire/USB adapters (the cheap and nasty ones that base on VIA chips) I though the situation was hopeless. Turns out Adaptec did a few of those combination PCI cards with better quality (NEC/TI) chipsets and right proper PCI-PCI bridge as opposed to just gluing two chips to the same PCI bus pins and hoping it would work. And what an improvement they truly are...too bad almost nobody ever noticed.

    I'd get my coat and fill it with the Adaptec support files, but I can't get download.adaptec.com to enumerate the entirety of its stored files using either HTTP or FTP. Any ideas?

    1. James 85

      Downloading

      Use a tool such as PageNext to download the entire http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/downloads/ site.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Pint

    RIP Adaptec

    I'll remember Adaptec well - they made some great products AHA1524 and AHA2940 also some great RAID cards.

    I never really had a problem with any of their gear and I will miss them...

    I wonder if it would be a good idea to Bit torrent all of the Adaptec support site but there is already an mirror of ftp.adaptec.com (here: http://195.113.144.229/MIRRORS/ftp.adaptec.com/) but it looks as though this is an old mirror (ftp.adaptec.com doesn't seem to be there anymore - not sure when it was last up as the mirror like is was from 2008 from some date stamps).

    Anon

  10. Mike Gravgaard
    Pint

    RE:That's just too bad...

    Already on it; I'm mirroring Adaptec's site (www.adaptec.com) with httrack.

    I'll put it up soon when I have it all.

    Mike

    1. The Unexpected Bill

      Reckon I'll grab it too...

      I didn't want to pull their whole web site, just the actual downloads. But I can, so I guess I will.

      While on the subject, I have one of the few mirrors you'll find of the IBM PCCBBS (as it existed in 1999, mirrored at that time by a very forward looking person) and I pulled all of the stuff from 3Com's FTP site a few weeks ago. Still working on getting that part up.

      I grabbed Gateway's FTP site around the time that Acer bought them. Had to put that one aside, though. Too many people were trying to mirror my mirror.

  11. Trevor_Pott Gold badge
    Unhappy

    Sad.

    I have a lot of 3805 adaptec controllers in the field. Still the odd 2410 or 2420sa. Been using Apadtec since the earliest SCSI days. Good cards. Sorry to see Adaptec go.

    R.I.P. my friend.

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