Lsi 9217-8i and eight samsung pro 850 ssd's...any recommendation?

[Ixlr8]

Hi, gentleman and ladies
What I have going on here is as follows and I was hoping that somebody here might have tried this or can make a helpful suggestion.

I currently have eight samsung 850 pro ssd's and have access to a relatively speaking low price 9217-8i controller card. This is the same as the 9207-8i but comes already flashed with IR. What I have for a mobo is a Asus maximus VI extreme and with just running 4 of the ssd's in raid 0 throughput is already easily saturated, in fact running 4 drives is pretty much pointless.( raid is set up on the mobo sata ports using that boards chipset z87) I would like to raid 0 all the drives just for the purpose of seeing what kind of throughput I could achieve. ( extreme pc's are just a hobby of mine ).........So I have done a lot of research and basically I would need a controller card that is Pcie 3.0 x8 lane interface . And of course this could be found with most very high dollar new offering raid controllers....but reality sets in and I do have to stay on a budget. Besides the main point is the most awesome bang for the buck...thats the challenge.........now from what I understand the only controller that would meet this pcie 3.0 x8 would have to use the lsi sas2308 ( the sas 2208 is only a pcie 2.0 and 8 drives would saturate that with no problem)

My main goal is to reach around if not a little over 4GB/s performance throughput.
A little back ground, I'm familiar with raid setups and especially with the chances of losing drive data ( the whole array )depended on the chances of using 8 drives. And also that this kind of throughput is not really needed...I'm mainly really interested in benchmarking.

Anybody's input on any of this or recommendations in another controller card besides the 9217-81 or even a whole other avenue of reaching my goals would be greatly appreciated
No doubt I'm probably leaving out pertinent information needed by the group...if so please let me know....without going into great detail about my pc setup I may be a little vague here....thanks

 

[dba]

Hi, gentleman and ladies
What I have going on here is as follows and I was hoping that somebody here might have tried this or can make a helpful suggestion.

I currently have eight samsung 850 pro ssd's and have access to a relatively speaking low price 9217-8i controller card. This is the same as the 9207-8i but comes already flashed with IR. What I have for a mobo is a Asus maximus VI extreme and with just running 4 of the ssd's in raid 0 throughput is already easily saturated, in fact running 4 drives is pretty much pointless.( raid is set up on the mobo sata ports using that boards chipset z87) I would like to raid 0 all the drives just for the purpose of seeing what kind of throughput I could achieve. ( extreme pc's are just a hobby of mine ).........So I have done a lot of research and basically I would need a controller card that is Pcie 3.0 x8 lane interface . And of course this could be found with most very high dollar new offering raid controllers....but reality sets in and I do have to stay on a budget. Besides the main point is the most awesome bang for the buck...thats the challenge.........now from what I understand the only controller that would meet this pcie 3.0 x8 would have to use the lsi sas2308 ( the sas 2208 is only a pcie 2.0 and 8 drives would saturate that with no problem)

My main goal is to reach around if not a little over 4GB/s performance throughput.
A little back ground, I'm familiar with raid setups and especially with the chances of losing drive data ( the whole array )depended on the chances of using 8 drives. And also that this kind of throughput is not really needed...I'm mainly really interested in benchmarking.

Anybody's input on any of this or recommendations in another controller card besides the 9217-81 or even a whole other avenue of reaching my goals would be greatly appreciated
No doubt I'm probably leaving out pertinent information needed by the group...if so please let me know....without going into great detail about my pc setup I may be a little vague here....thanks

The cheapest method to maximize your raw benchmark-fodder throughput, assuming that your motherboard can handle it, is install one more inexpensive HBA to total two, each with four drives in RAID0, and then to software stripe those two RAID sets in the OS. You probably won't quite hit 4GB/s, but you will get close.
As you discovered, a single PCIe2 x8 HBA cannot handle eight drives, so the only approach is to use two of them! I have used this approach (software RAID 1E and multiple HBAs) with up to 14 RAID controller chips. Or go PCIe3

 

[Marsh]

LSI 9217 or 9207 from LSI spec is " Host Bus Type x8 lane PCI Express® 3.0 "

I used 1 LSI 9217 flash to IT mode with a crappy $10 MSI Z87 motherboard and a Celeron CPU, 12 x 3 tb sata seagate drives in Xpenology raid 6, during data scrub, it would hit 1.4GB/s to 1.6 GB /s read.

Double check if the LSI card is plug into the faster pci 3.0 slot.

 

[Ixlr8]

thanks for the input, and yes my board is 5 slot pcie all 3.0

 

[mrkrad]

Why don't you just wire them up to the Sata ports on the mobo and use software raid? you'll get a lot more use out of 850 pro's with trim activated (than doing OP to keep them alive without TRIM).

 

[Ixlr8]

Well the reason is with only 4 of my 8 ssd's hooked into the boards sata controller for raid 0 I have saturated the throughput at 1600 mb/s. So even though I have enough sata ports for more ssd's its not worth putting anymore into the array.

I've done a lot of experimenting with trim and various garbage collector programs , and I don't believe that not having trim will turn into any real issue for my uses..( this is just my hobby pc, and mainly used as a test bed for new hardware and benchmarking. The mobo also features ssd secure erase that completely refreshes the drives back to new.

BTW I mentioned that I was thinking of using a lsi 9217-8i for the card, however I have also ran into another one recently....the IBM ServeRAID M5110 anybody any thoughts on this card?.maybe I should start a new post on that.