LSI SAS 9265-8i 6Gb/s 1GB cache RAID 170$ !?!

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enigmo

New Member
Apr 30, 2013
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wow, i just got the 280$ 9265-8i in...DOA. no green led, doesnt even show up in bios...fml

enigmo: check a few posts up, you will see that the supercap's connector does not look like it will fit the 9265-8i
Hi,
Yes, I noted that. I have a 9265 with BBU already and that's all happy and being left well alone! I was after a supercap to fit a M5016 as well as I'd got one for another server. I already knew the connectors were a different size (cache on 9265 vs cache on M5016) but wasn't sure until these posts that the auction linked to would do the job for the IBM card.
 

myrison

Member
Jan 26, 2011
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Update on my card: Flashed to the latest LSI Firmware without issue. I now have 17 drives running various stress/torture tests (1 SSD & 16 spinning disks mixed between SATA II and SATA III). For the last 48 hours it's been unflappable. I'm currently running an 11TB copy from a 4 disk RAID 0 (4x3TB SATA III) set to a 10 disk RAID 6 (6x2TB SATA II), and it's been copying consistently at around 375 MB/s for the last 5 hours.

I also got the legit BBU09 battery unit in this afternoon. I'm planning on shutting down the server this evening to install it.

James23 - I'd order another one from the original seller, I think you just had crappy luck on the first (and now second!) run.
 

james23

Active Member
Nov 18, 2014
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Thanks for the support, the orginal seller from my OP ran out of cards the day i tried to get a replacement (a few days after my card came in), they are giving me a full refund... the 2nd card was from a different ebay seller, and it was totally DOA, so he already gave me a full refund (i shipped the card back to him a few days later, at my expense :( )

I actually was able to lock down a 9271-8i (should be even better card right? i know same its the exact same cpu, but its got nearly 2x the MTBF rating as the 9265-8i and its PCIe x8 3.0, although im putting it into a pcie x8 2.0 slot :/ )

anyone have any input on running a 9271-8i ( got it for 255$ shipped, im a little worried though bc that price seems pretty low, although its supposedly brand new in antistatic bag, meaning no box but sealed..)
 

PersonalJ

Member
May 17, 2013
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Thanks for the support, the orginal seller from my OP ran out of cards the day i tried to get a replacement (a few days after my card came in), they are giving me a full refund... the 2nd card was from a different ebay seller, and it was totally DOA, so he already gave me a full refund (i shipped the card back to him a few days later, at my expense :( )

I actually was able to lock down a 9271-8i (should be even better card right? i know same its the exact same cpu, but its got nearly 2x the MTBF rating as the 9265-8i and its PCIe x8 3.0, although im putting it into a pcie x8 2.0 slot :/ )

anyone have any input on running a 9271-8i ( got it for 255$ shipped, im a little worried though bc that price seems pretty low, although its supposedly brand new in antistatic bag, meaning no box but sealed..)
"Brand new" in an anti-static bag means it's likely OEM or an OEM pull.
 

james23

Active Member
Nov 18, 2014
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"Brand new" in an anti-static bag means it's likely OEM or an OEM pull.
I agree, but on this one im cautiously optimistic it may be real LSI, as the packaging in the ebay picture is the exact same packaging that i see in a review done on a site of the 9271-8i (they had full unboxing picts) and included in the sealed anti static bag is the LSI manual (also like in the review's unboxing picts) so im hoping!! it comes tomorrow, ill def be updating here with the results of my now 3rd attempt at getting a working LSI card via ebay :))
to recap:
1st one was DELL oem (9265-8i), came in not booting to a BIOS error, doing a mode0 flash bought the card alive, but its 1gb cache seemed to be fully dead (would not show up, nor did i have the raid 6 option).
card 2 (9265-8i) came in fully DOA
card 3 - is a 9271-8i sold as brand new sealed, and comes in tomorrow! (friday)
 

canta

Well-Known Member
Nov 26, 2014
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I agree, but on this one im cautiously optimistic it may be real LSI, as the packaging in the ebay picture is the exact same packaging that i see in a review done on a site of the 9271-8i (they had full unboxing picts) and included in the sealed anti static bag is the LSI manual (also like in the review's unboxing picts) so im hoping!! it comes tomorrow, ill def be updating here with the results of my now 3rd attempt at getting a working LSI card via ebay :))
to recap:
1st one was DELL oem (9265-8i), came in not booting to a BIOS error, doing a mode0 flash bought the card alive, but its 1gb cache seemed to be fully dead (would not show up, nor did i have the raid 6 option).
card 2 (9265-8i) came in fully DOA
card 3 - is a 9271-8i sold as brand new sealed, and comes in tomorrow! (friday)
what a journey for you.....
some Dell OEM model would behave differently when flashes with LSI firmware. the best bet is flashing with DELLizer firmware.


good luck on your journey.
 

wardtj

Member
Jan 23, 2015
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I agree, but on this one im cautiously optimistic it may be real LSI, as the packaging in the ebay picture is the exact same packaging that i see in a review done on a site of the 9271-8i (they had full unboxing picts) and included in the sealed anti static bag is the LSI manual (also like in the review's unboxing picts) so im hoping!! it comes tomorrow, ill def be updating here with the results of my now 3rd attempt at getting a working LSI card via ebay :))
to recap:
1st one was DELL oem (9265-8i), came in not booting to a BIOS error, doing a mode0 flash bought the card alive, but its 1gb cache seemed to be fully dead (would not show up, nor did i have the raid 6 option).
card 2 (9265-8i) came in fully DOA
card 3 - is a 9271-8i sold as brand new sealed, and comes in tomorrow! (friday)
Hey! I do not want to give you some bad news, but I own a LSI9271-8i. I love the card, but it has some.. features.. to be aware of.

It runs HOT. And I really mean HOT. If you plug it in a case, just to power test it, it will climb to 104-115C in a matter of a couple of minutes. It needs active cooling. I had to Macgyver a 8000RPM 40mm fan to mine to get the temps down. It runs at 55C all day with the fan pretty much blowing across it. You need to take this into consideration with that card. The price you paid is good, I spent 625$ on mine.

Also, this card does NOT like Sandforce SSD's. Well known issues with this card, and many other SSD's too, notably Samsung. I had a S3500 hooked up to it, and it worked ok but the performance is slow. In the GUI it will tell you that SSD Cache Setting is disabled. This means, the write cache on the drive itself is disabled. Writes will be pokey. I had two Sandforce 256GB drives in RAID 0 (HyperX) on there, and instead of getting ~1GB/s on writes, it managed around 250MB/s or so. I did the same configuration on my internal SATA connectors, and got almost 1GB/s in RAID 0 to them. So, just be aware that it is not friendly to SSD's as it could be. The firmware has gotten much better in the last couple of releases. I'm also using mine in a 8x PCIe 3.0 slot.

And.. if you use this on Linux, driver support, is there, but, don't expect many features exposed.

On the flipside, the card does deliver some very good performance numbers. I happen to have a Supermicro 846E16-R1200B SAS2-846EL1 that holds 24 drives. I created a RAID 60 with 22 Seagate 1TB ES drives, and on burst writes, I will get 2.1GB/s. Over my 10Gbe iSCSI to that same enclosure, I will get 990MB/s read, and 860MB/s writes. So, the card does run very well. Random IO is not bad either with large queue depths.

I have a couple LSI9260-8i's, and they run cooler, and the performance is not bad. They are the 512MB versions, and I cannot complain there. As noted in the forums and with a Quick google search, they are relatively cheap and plentiful. The performance is also good. I have 8 WD Greens (yes, those ones!) in a RAID 5, and in over 2 years, never had a drop out or problem. I do a lot of archiving, so, for my copying, I get 950MB/s on average writing to the RAID 5 set from the 9271-8i card in the slot beside it.

Food for thought. I hope you had a better purchasing experience. I've never had that kind of buying karma on eBay before.

GL!
 

james23

Active Member
Nov 18, 2014
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Woo fin hoo! What a change in my luck for the better! My 9271 came in, it appears to be real LSI as it includes the original manual and just about everything except the actual box, it was fully sealed in the exact packaging that I saw on a LSI 9271 un-boxing review so I think I got a great price on a real LSI card that works. However the card does appear to be used (it has a red and black sharpie mark on each of the Sff-8087 ports ) and has tons of entries in the event log, but so far appears to be in full working condition- I see the one gigabyte cache , I also see raid 5 and raid 6 software licenses as well as something called cache offload and fastpath however for FastPath it says it will be disabled at reboot which is something I had read about online before). Whoever packaged this card did a near perfect job of making it appear as if it is fully sealed from the LSI factory as the antistatic bag seal sticker looks just like the one in the un boxing review

Some other good news is an extra battery backup unit I came across for the 3 cards ( the same battery back up which failed on my prior two cards, is showing as fully charged on this one - which further shows that the last two cards I got in were hardware defective)

First off thank you to canta and wardtj for your replies! Wardtj your reply was especially timely in that I read it 30 minutes before I receive the card- I had read before that this card runs hot and while it will permanently be in a 4u supermicro chassis very similar to yours, my test system which is where the card will be for a few days is a 4u supermicro chassis with only a few fans installed, so I have a fan I added pointing directly at the 9271 card to keep it cool in the test system)

In my main server (which is where this card will eventually go) I have a large supermicro fan attached externally to where the PCI E slots are , sucking air out to keep my Adaptec raid cards cool as they too do not have an active fan and even with all the 4u sm fans installed and running I had gotten the over temperature alarm from Adaptec- meaning of the card had reached 100°C, so I added this external fan at the back of the server and all three of my Adaptec cards have remained below 65°C ever since , so the same fan will help this LSI card stay cool once it's in that server).

For now I have 6 x extra 150gb velociraptor sata drives I'm going to use to test out this card and play with fully. I'll report back with some screenshots of speeds for different raid settings.

I also have an Intel res2sv240 expander card I'll be testing with it too- it'll be interesting to see if there's any difference in speed when running the drive direct or through the expander card (it is a 6.0 GB/s expander)

Will update later with bench mark stats and info!
 

james23

Active Member
Nov 18, 2014
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UGGGhh!! i finally get an amazing card..amazing benchmarks...everything working great!! and i find out the LSI does not allow you to create different raid types on the same disk! i really need that feature for this build im doing (adaptec, arcea..EVEN HPT allow this feature!!)

so anyway im looking to trade the card for an adaptec 7 series if anyone is interested..see the thread i made in the trade form... :~(((

a bit of good news though...another chiester from ebay sold me a LSI 9265 (the one i wrote about a few pages back in this thread) about a week after the card was outside its warranty date...the card was totally dead, thus the reason this loooser was selling it to me on ebay ( i paid 280$ for it too!).. anyway, he did refund my $, and didnt want to pay for the return shipping so he said keep the card (obviously he knew it was bad and not worth the return shipping)... BUTTT LSI accepted the card for RMA!! so they will be fixing or swaping the card out! turns out they bumped up the warranty a month or 2 on some cards and the ebay scammer must not have bothered to call after checking the cards SN online.
 

wardtj

Member
Jan 23, 2015
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Are you talking about RAID 50 or 60?

Or the ability to use "partial" disks in a RAID set? Partial disks in a set are not very safe, though, they are useful. If I needed that functionality, I would simply use mdadm on Linux to create RAID devices out of different partitions. Windows would also let you do this, as I used to do this years ago on Windows 2000. I would not use a 9271 or any RAID based controller for that though. I'd be using a HBA, and keeping it simple.

Glad to see you finally got some good Karma out of your ordeal with that 9265!
 

james23

Active Member
Nov 18, 2014
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Hey,
Im talking about what ive always done on my other controllers to maximise disk usage... that is having different raid types on the same disk.
ie if i have 10 x 2 tb drives:

5x rd6 @ 3 TB
5x rd6 @ 3 TB
10 x RD5 @ 9 TB
10x RD0 @ 500 gb (scratch disk for photoshop / avid / temp VMs for testing)

a setup like that versus being stuck with all 10 x in ONLY raid 6 , or 5x in raid 6 and 5x stuck in raid 5 (and no ability for a raid 0).

I agree combining arrays at the OS level is not a good idea performance or data integrity wise. I just loved (and always used) the flexibility of using the drives the way i need to. ie if i have videos that can be easily replaced (via torrents for example), but i need alot of space for those videos, create a 8 x drive RAID 5, but if i have very critical data create a smaller disk # raid 6 (like 5 or 6 disks)... if i need a small amount of space with important data i can create a 10x drive raid 6 (bc the rebuild will be fast if i loose a disk bc the partition in this example is a smaller size).. Thats the flexibility im absolutely astounded that LSI does not offer (when every other raid manufacturer does offer)

The answer i got from LSI support (the tech i spoke with really didn't seem to know much about what he was speaking about) , was that many of their customers need the ability to add disks to an existing array (to expand that arrays capacity) and if you allow what i need it makes easily adding disks difficult. (to which i replied, if you really need to add disks to expand capacity, then you can just copy the files off the other arrays on those disks, remove the arrays, grow it, then re-add the arrays and copy your data back)

Please update / correct me if im missing something here. thanks for the reply as well!

EDIT; here is another, maybe better example of what i want / why i want this feature (and cant believe that LSI does'nt offer this):

on my adaptec 5405z, i have 4 x 100gb SSD drives connected. i have:

1x 80gb RD6 (4 x ssds) for my OS boot drive (win 2008 r2)
1x 60gb RD6 (4 x ssds) for some VMs boot (vmware workstation)
1x 26gb RD5 (4 x ssds) for a plex database ( i can somewhat easily recreate this db, but id rather not loose it if i happen to loose 1 SSD drive, yet i need a bit more space than would be available if i made this a RD6 array, thus i used RD5)
1x 90gb RD0 (4 x ssds) for use as a scratch drive (its really fast, i put temp data on this or use it for benchmarking), i also use this raid 0 array as the location for my windows pagefile.sys (the virtual memory file).

this would not be possible to do on a LSI card, i would have to go ALL raid 6 arrays, or ALL raid 0, or ALL raid 5 arrays. the same exact concept is applied to my larger disk arrays, i dont want to be locked into just one type of RAID type, as this will result it lots of wasted drive space.. id rather have 2 x raid 6 arrays on 2x separate disk groups, than 1x HUGE rd6 arrays (or a few arrays) all the the same disk group. idea being, if i loose 3 drives on that set of disks i loose all of my rd6 array contents versus having to loose 3x drives on one set of disks AND 3x drives on another set of disks to loose all my raid 6 contents.. :~~~(

How is it that i get this, but LSI DOESNT?!?! there MUST be others out there in the same situation??
 
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