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Adaptec ANA 62011TX

Adaptec has long been in the running for all kinds of hardware solutions. While best known for their SCSI controller cards, they also produce low to high-end NIC cards. The ANA 62011TX is a higher-end NIC, designed to run in fast network segments when bandwidth is of the utmost concern. There are several things that set this NIC apart from the crowd, so let’s run over the features.

The Adaptec ANA 62011TX

One PCI 2.2 bus compliant NIC, with 32 bit and 64 bit connectors with support under Windows 3.11, 9x, NT, and 2000. The box also holds one of the thickest and most comprehensive manuals I have ever seen shipped with an expansion card of ANY kind, (mainly containing resources for the DuraLan software) and 3 Installation floppies including the install for their Patented DuraLan software utility. The card is covered by their Lifetime warranty.

O.k., so why is this card so different? First of all, it is huge! Not huge by old standards, but huge by the ever so shrinking size of today’s expansion cards, and the largest in the roundup. This is due mainly due to the extra 32-bit connection at the end of the regular PCI connection. When connected to a motherboard supporting it, this 32-bit connector allows the NIC to perform 64 bit transfers to the CPU. If the system board isn’t equipped with a 64 bit expansion off the PCI bus, the card defaults to standard 32 bit transfers like the other 32bit PCI cards in the roundup.

There is also no WOL or Boot-ROM support included on this NIC –but since this card is more focused on data speeds, these features are minor when considering buying a card of this nature.

Installation of the Adaptec card was fairly simple. Even though I didn’t use the extra 32 bit connector, the card slipped right into my Abit motherboard and allowed for plenty of room, and you won’t have to worry too much about the card hanging over the PCI slot, because it only hangs over by a few inches, and most motherboards can handle that. After installing the driver in my Windows NT machine, I decided to see what the Dura-LAN software actually did. My findings? -Absolutely nothing for the NIC when installed as a single NIC. However, the software would have much use when used in a system with more than one NIC, because it can then perform port aggregation and port fail over. These features basically allow a certain amount of network fault tolerance and bandwidth increases, but again they are only useable when there is more than one NIC installed, so I didn’t find them very functional in my test machine. Coming in at a $99 price tag, this is the highest priced NIC in the bunch, but Adaptec backs it up with a lifetime warranty and the card is obviously targeted at a much higher technology different market.

So with all this under the hood how did it perform? Splendidly.

Performance marks for the Adaptec ANA 62011TX with driver rev.4.2

Time to transfer files: 2:50
Network utilization: 17%
Frames /sec: 4149-17573
Frames dropped:0
CPU utilization: 67%

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