9260 vs 9265, 8i, /w CacheCade Pro 2.0 & Other Caching HBAs

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frogtech

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Jan 4, 2016
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I'm looking at HBAs with caching features in the firmware and it seems like of all of the capable LSI cards below the 3000 series chipsets, these 2, specifically the 9260 and 9265 (2108 and 2208 chipsets) are the best contenders.

However I see that the physical key for CacheCade Pro 2.0 is considerably more expensive than the key for the 9260, by well, a lot.

Does anyone have experience using either controller and can comment on how much better the 9265 is? I won't have more than 5 10K SAS HDDs + 1 SSD cache hooked up per controller.

Also looking for some more suggestions on similar gen cards that have caching capabilities (with 2 vertical connectors). Seem to be a little limited there unfortunately.
 
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alex1002

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Apr 9, 2013
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For the price of the controller and cachecade. Why not just get all ssds?

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frogtech

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Well, I need the controllers anyway. The disks were pretty cheap all things considered so I already have them. I'm doing pooled storage in converged SFF chassis so more disks = more performance, I could get SSDs but I either get small ones now at a small premium off ebay and upgrade later (more $$$ and time spent buying/reselling) or pay more than I want to to get the same capacity. I have about 27TB worth of disks to use across 3 chassis for various projects/implementations. 9260 controllers can be had for about 50 bucks if you get lucky. Cachecade keys are like 20, so it's not that much.
 

Jb boin

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May 26, 2016
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If you use Linux, you can use BCache which will do the same as cachecade but on the OS level.
And if you are worried about the safety of the datas, at least 2 SSDs in RAID1 would be better.
 

frogtech

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If you use Linux, you can use BCache which will do the same as cachecade but on the OS level.
And if you are worried about the safety of the datas, at least 2 SSDs in RAID1 would be better.
Thanks for the reply, I may consider it.

I am wondering, how is BCache handled?

Say you have 5 spindle disks and 1 SSD and two possible scenarios

1 scenario is where they are configured with a passthrough controller like the 2008/2308 LSI, as directly handled by the OS without anything like ZFS/ext3,4/JBOD/RAID0

the other scenario is where they are configured with a RoC-controller(2108/2208 LSI) with each device as individual RAID0's.

Can BCache be used or configured to present that SSD as the cache for those 5 devices even though they are individual? I don't think ScaleIO is particular on how the devices get to the OS as their individual selves only that you work out your topology before hand and use only 1 caching technology at a given time. If I go with something like CC or BCache ScaleIO never knows about the SSD cache; it's handled by the controller or other software.
 

alex1002

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BTW I have a cache cache with 8*15k drives and 4*256gb ssds in raid10 I think you need to pair of ssds to be safe

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Jb boin

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With BCache you create a "backed" device (its like a RAID logical disk) and you can set a disk/RAID to be its cache, its ony one command to detach/attach a cache (or to put a new cache device).

With it, you can for example have 2 SSDs plugged directly to the motherboard using software to do RAID1 that you attach to your RAID of disks that uses the hardware RAID card and its cache or create 1 logical disk of RAID1 of the SSDs and one of RAID of the disks.

If you have only one SSD you can also enable the cache only for reads but you will loose a great part of the benefits of all of it.