I have a current media server that I am trying desperately to get a bit more life out of before I retire it for newer technology and have found that there may be a problem with the LSI RAID controller's onboard cache (soldered to board, non-removeable/non-upgradeable) as it has a habit of going offline during heavy writes when in write-back for no good reason, forcing a reboot (Windows).
The card runs flawlessly dumbed-down using write-through, albeit, slow without the write cache.
Can enabling cachecade and adding a SAS SSD (as the array is all SAS) as write cache buy me a bit more time with this setup, removing the controller's cache from the equation entirely ?
I don't want to take a chance and simply replace the controller with the same model, as I don't know what I will be getting and the price of a 100GB Enterprise SAS SSD is extremely cheap (if the plan were to succeed).
LSI 9261-8i (running HW RAID5)
SAS Dell/Seagate Constellations (all identical)
64bit Windows 7
thanks in advance,
Allan
ps. the controller did the same thing using SATA drives also.
The card runs flawlessly dumbed-down using write-through, albeit, slow without the write cache.
Can enabling cachecade and adding a SAS SSD (as the array is all SAS) as write cache buy me a bit more time with this setup, removing the controller's cache from the equation entirely ?
I don't want to take a chance and simply replace the controller with the same model, as I don't know what I will be getting and the price of a 100GB Enterprise SAS SSD is extremely cheap (if the plan were to succeed).
LSI 9261-8i (running HW RAID5)
SAS Dell/Seagate Constellations (all identical)
64bit Windows 7
thanks in advance,
Allan
ps. the controller did the same thing using SATA drives also.