IBM M1015 Experiences

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mobilenvidia

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Sep 25, 2011
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Runs latest LSI 9240 FW just fine 20.10.1.0061

Tried the M5000 Adv key card in the M1015 :D
I can get the SED and RAID5 options to show in the OptionROM.
But once I reboot the system becomes horribly slllllloooooooowwwww
So it recognised some of the key, but it goes awry along the line.
Might have a play with older FW to see if this works.

Quite cool with all these LED's, one for each drive, 2 on top always on, one heartbeat, and 2 on the back I assume a special bracket with holes is needed to see these.
 

mobilenvidia

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Took quite some effort to undo what the M5000 key did.
Needed to cleanflash the card and reset to Factory.
Adding the key all is well, then making array (no matter JBOD or RAID) system become very slow upon reboot.

JBOD test.
4x SATA3 SSD's in JBOD then striped in Windows ATTO = 1300MB/s Write, 1450MB/s read, up to 1800MB's reads with 512MB and 1024MB blocks but drops with larger
The M1015 does not add too much performance boost over Intel SW RAID0, ZFS should do well with these in JBOD then SW RAID'd
 

mobilenvidia

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Card runs happily in IT mode as either a 9210 or 9211, tried both.

I needed to disable boot control to be able to boot to windows

Very limited tweaking in IT mode, in either the very basic OptionROM or MSM
But some comprehensive timing adjustments can be made in OptionROM

Set up Windows with the 4x SSD's striped via IT mode and latest 9211 FW:
ATTO write 1450MB/s, read 2050MB/s, best results yet.

AS SDD 4k results took ages to show but also best I've seen, 27MB/s read, 79MB/s write

Now it's bed time, hope this helps someone
 
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mobilenvidia

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Just flashed to 9211-IR mode.

I think this is probably the best over all mode.

It has RAID 0, 1, 10 for those that need it
HDD Passthrough for unconfigured good Disks (automatically)
SMART is passed on.

It's identical in speed to 9211-IT mode.

I havn't flashed the OptionROM but can configure the card via MSM
Makes the boot process nice and fast

Quite impressed with this mode.
If I was to keep on using this card for the SSD's then this mode would be it.
 
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mobilenvidia

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Just clean installed Win7 using the M1015 in 9211 IR mode.
4x SSD's in RAID 0
3x HDD's

Disabled Intel ICHR in BIOS no drives attached.

Removing HDD from intel controller made LSI boot much quicker (ie long wait at Win7 startup screen)

Very pleased with this setup.
 

mobilenvidia

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Hmmm, Anvil Beta 9 is giving me really slow write results for 4k (<1MB/s)
Read results are what they should be.

Can't work out why, may need to flash the card to IT mode to see if it fixes it.
Currently running M1015 as a 9211-8i in IR mode
AS-SSD works just fine and displays speeds for 4k writes as expected.

When I put the Array (RAID0) into the M5015 the write speeds are fine.
So its not the SSDs

BTW LSI 9211 RAID0 array can be transported to LSI9260 and works
 

Patrick

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Yea, the only reason to go to IT is when you want to use pass-through for a software RAID-type (e.g. ZFS.)

You do not want to have the RAID card BIOS trying to recover from an error when a drive's firmware is trying to recover from the error and the software RAID logic is also trying to adjust. If you are not faced with this, then IR makes a lot of sense and LSI volumes are very portable.
 

Philmatic

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Sep 15, 2011
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Just flashed to 9211-IR mode.

I think this is probably the best over all mode.

It has RAID 0, 1, 10 for those that need it
HDD Passthrough for unconfigured good Disks (automatically)
SMART is passed on.
I have three IBM m1015's in my WHS 2011 box. Before building the server, I flashed all three cards to IT mode and I'm not seeing any SMART data or temperature readings in Windows. Is this a casualty of IT mode? I guess I can always go back to IR mode, which driver do you suggest for WHS 2011 (W2K8R2 x64)?
 

mobilenvidia

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WHS drivers = Win2k8r2, Win7x64 then Vista in that order of preference according to MS
In IT/IR mode look for LSI9211 drivers NOT IBM M1015 or LSI 9240 there is a difference in RAID stacks between the 2

IT mode IR mode that is up to you, if all is well with IT and you can live without smart and temps then stick with it.
 

Philmatic

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WHS drivers = Win2k8r2, Win7x64 then Vista in that order of preference according to MS
In IT/IR mode look for LSI9211 drivers NOT IBM M1015 or LSI 9240 there is a difference in RAID stacks between the 2

IT mode IR mode that is up to you, if all is well with IT and you can live without smart and temps then stick with it.
So it's common for IT mode to not pass SMART and temp data? That's absolutley critical for me to be honest. Kinda the whole reason I went with a single type of controller.

I'll try the 9211 drivers before reflashing back to IR mode. How hard is that?
 

mobilenvidia

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I've not had a chance to test the SMART-ness of the LSI cards.
Too busy with testing RAID where there is no SMART at all I do believe or TRIM
LSI cards have ECC tests on it's internals so errors will be found and reported, you don't need and SMART may not even notice these.
Speaking of which SAS has full ECC on reads and writes, where as SATA doesn't.

Temperatures I can see in the MSM app, also in the BIOS, I've not tested to see if its passed on.
This would be a biggy in a server if a fan failed, but IPMI can check this, HDD temp and fan speed ?

To me SMART is not a biggy, it won't tell you or prevent the HDD from just crashing or failing without warning.
 

mobilenvidia

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M1015 with LSI 20.10.1.0061 FW (LSI) in RAID0
C:\Program Files (x86)\smartmontools\bin>smartctl -a sdc
smartctl 5.42 2011-10-20 r3458 [i686-w64-mingw32-win7(64)] (sf-win32-5.42-1)
Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

Vendor: IBM
Product: ServeRAID M1015
Revision: 2.12
User Capacity: 176,997,531,648 bytes [176 GB]
Logical block size: 512 bytes
Logical Unit id: 0x600605b003e86570166d5ae49c9c74a0
Serial number: 00a0749c9ce45a6d167065e803b00506
Device type: disk
Local Time is: Sun Dec 04 08:40:47 2011 NZDT
Device does not support SMART

Error Counter logging not supported
Device does not support Self Test logging
 
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mobilenvidia

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M1015 in LSI9211-IT mode:
C:\Program Files (x86)\smartmontools\bin>smartctl -a /dev/sdd -d sat
smartctl 5.42 2011-10-20 r3458 [i686-w64-mingw32-win7(64)] (sf-win32-5.42-1)
Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model: OCZ-SOLID3
Serial Number: OCZ-7OFMSH0UNLB882EV
LU WWN Device Id: 5 e83a97 ef29c5b33
Firmware Version: 2.15
User Capacity: 60,022,480,896 bytes [60.0 GB]
Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical
Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is: 8
ATA Standard is: ACS-2 revision 3
Local Time is: Sun Dec 04 09:19:21 2011 NZDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
All drives appear as 'Unconfigured Good' and pass through
AS IT has no ability to do RAID at all, there are no barriers to stop anything being passed.
 
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mobilenvidia

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M1015 as LSI9211-IR
"C:\Program Files (x86)\smartmontools\bin\smartctl.exe" -a H:\

smartctl 5.42 2011-10-20 r3458 [i686-w64-mingw32-win7(64)] (sf-win32-5.42-1)
Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

Vendor: LSI
Product: Logical Volume
Revision: 3000
User Capacity: 117,998,354,432 bytes [117 GB]
Logical block size: 512 bytes
Logical Unit id: 0x600508e000000000a42874ffda0b7b0f
Device type: disk
Local Time is: Sun Dec 04 09:40:08 2011 NZDT
Device does not support SMART

Error Counter logging not supported
Device does not support Self Test logging
This is a 2x SSD RAID0 array.
As mentioned earlier RAID = no parity
 

mobilenvidia

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M1015 as LSI9211-IR
C:\Program Files (x86)\smartmontools\bin>smartctl -a /dev/sdd -d sat
smartctl 5.42 2011-10-20 r3458 [i686-w64-mingw32-win7(64)] (sf-win32-5.42-1)
Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model: OCZ-SOLID3
Serial Number: OCZ-JMVY052CY854YF72
LU WWN Device Id: 5 e83a97 f1b1ebc34
Firmware Version: 2.15
User Capacity: 60,022,480,896 bytes [60.0 GB]
Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical
Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is: 8
ATA Standard is: ACS-2 revision 3
Local Time is: Sun Dec 04 09:45:37 2011 NZDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
This is a 'Unconfigured Good' drive
 

Philmatic

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Sep 15, 2011
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M1015 as LSI9211-IT
Weird, I'm seeing what you're seeing. I have to pass in the "-d sat" argument to get any data out of it if the hard drive is on the M1015s, but if it's plugged into my motherboard port (My OS drive is), it works fine.

Is getting the OS to see the SMART data behind a SAT layer something I can do at the driver level so software like StableBit Scanner can read it? Or do I need to get with the developer to add that support in?