IBM M5210 Success Story

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

Truckchase!

New Member
Oct 10, 2012
7
1
3
North Central US
FWIW, I wanted to share a successful installation of a used IBM M5210 RAID controller. I received the controller with a 1GB cache w/flash module on Ebay for $99 not knowing if I could get it working in one of my older systems.

The controller is running IBM FW version Version 24.9.0-0026 and the server mainboard in question here is the Asus P8BE4L. The card is running in the second slot (16x physical, 8x electrical) as the first is used by a Quadro card for RemoteFX VDI. CSM/legacy is enabled, because of my OS installation I was not able to test with full UEFI and CSM off.

After getting the system to boot 8GB of system RAM was missing, and I remembered an old SMBus trick from years ago. A bit of google-fu led me to PCIe pins 5 and 6 as mentioned here, the covering of which with scotch tape allowed the system to boot with all memory.

After that the process was simple, it wasn't even necessary to import the virtual drives that had existed on my 5015 controller, and after a driver update all was well. Benchmarks resulted in anywhere between 10% and 40% more IOPS with the same drives using diskspd.exe tests.

I do not have a super capacitor yet to enable dumping the cache to NVRAM, but I have an ordered one on the way from Ebay as well. If I run into any trouble or notes I'll post it here.

Hopefully this helps others in pursuing the use of this card.
 
  • Like
Reactions: T_Minus