IBM SERVERAID M5014 upgrade woth it?

[survive]

IBM SERVERAID M5014 upgrade worth it?

Hi guys,

Quick question about the IBM ServerRaid M5014 deal linked on the front page......

I have an Adaptec 3405 running a RAID-10 of 4 750GB WD Black drives in an ESXi 5.1 box. Would it be worth it to replace the Adaptec with one of these M5014 controllers?

-Will

 

[Patrick]

Great question. What generation 750GB black drives are you using?

I used to have Adaptec 31605 cards in my server with BBUs. OK, but once you loaded them up with drives, they got slow. The M5014's are LSI SAS2108 which is about two generations newer than the 3 series Adaptec cards.

Now, for RAID 10, if everything is fine, I would say save your money.

The things that would drive me do the upgrade:

• You started using 6.0gbps drives.
• You are not getting 2x single drive speed with the 3405 (I would guess you are fine)
• You want a BBU and figure this is an OK time to upgrade.
• You need to go beyond 4 drives.
• You want to also have a SSD array

 

[survive]

Hi Patrick,

I think I'm going to get one and give it a shot, if for no other reason than so I can get drive\array health monitoring under ESXi. I found the following article here:

http://tinkertry.com/lsi92xx-health-under-esxi-51/

that describes how to do it.

Given the price of the card, I think it would be wise to get at least one of my boxes off the old Adaptec controller. My biggest concern is that my motherboard might end up having fits with it. I'll start another thread over in the motherboard section detailing why.

-Will