LSI RAID Controller and HBA Complete Listing Plus OEM Models

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dba

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Feb 20, 2012
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In addition, though I have never posted a review, I have used and benchmarked the 9205. In spite of the upgrade from LSISAS2008 to LSISAS2308, the performance is essentially identical between the two. The 2308 is a significantly faster chip, but the PCIe2 bus is holding it back in the 9205. It wasn't until the 9207 that we saw the 2308 really perform.

The 9207 I think we do have experience in. Jeff did a great LSI 9207-8e review a few months back.
 

TheBay

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Feb 25, 2013
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I'm in the process of building some new servers, a certain board has caught my eye.
ASUS - Server & Workstation- ASUS P8B-C/SAS/4L The ASUS P8B-C/SAS/4L

It has an onboard LSI2008 controller, looking at the information from spec sheets/manuals it has IR firmware, I can't find any further information but am interested in using these boards,
but they would need to be in IT/JBOD mode, I called ASUS UK/US and will call ASUS Asia, but no one has a clue what I'm on about, does anyone have any information on whether these can be cross-flashed,
also does anyone know what speed/mode they run at on the PCIe bus as the old PIKE card's were half speed!.

Great forum btw, have been reading it for a while just got round to registering here :) , I modified the HP Microserver Bios that some may be using, it's a little project of mine.

Dale
 
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TheBay

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Feb 25, 2013
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*Update*, managed to find a diagram for this motherboard, not good news.

For some reason Asus opted to use 16x lanes from the CPU to PCie 16x, then the remaining 4x lanes to the onboard LSI 2008.

The other PCI/PCIe/Lan lanes come off the PCH.

Really don't know why Asus went for a 16x/4x configuration on a server board, 8x/8x would have been ideal.

Now looking at Supermicro again, I have been offered a brand new X9SCL-F for £39 delivered from a supplier, I know it's cheap but would still have to buy a NIC on top of that, plus no Sata6.
 

TheBay

New Member
Feb 25, 2013
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*Update*, managed to find a diagram for this motherboard, not good news.

For some reason Asus opted to use 16x lanes from the CPU to PCie 16x, then the remaining 4x lanes to the onboard LSI 2008.

The other PCI/PCIe/Lan lanes come off the PCH.

Really don't know why Asus went for a 16x/4x configuration on a server board, 8x/8x would have been ideal.

Now looking at Supermicro again, I have been offered a brand new X9SCL-F for £39 delivered from a supplier, I know it's cheap but would still have to buy a NIC on top of that, plus no Sata6.
Just bought an original LSI 2308 based card, a SAS 9207-8i.
 

mobilenvidia

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Sep 25, 2011
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Updated

SAS3008
SAS3108

All the 3xxx series controillers now get HD connectors, this should see cable prices drop.
16x port HBA's are in there to keep up with PMC/Adaptec
Ooooohhh, aaaahh, the LSI9301-16e looks very tasty with dual SAS3008s and PCIe 16x, I wonder if they'll ever make a dual SAS3116 (16 port HBA) version with 16 internal and 16 internal HD ports all on a PCIe 16x card


From latest LSI gossip PDF


Can we get this thread stickied so it stays at the top of the list and we don't have to dig for it?? :)
Done, mainly so I can find it easily to update it.
 
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mobilenvidia

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Sep 25, 2011
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SAS2208, added Mobo's:
X9DRW-7TPF 2x 4 port internal SAS horizontal, RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, 6, 50, 60, 1GB cache
X9DRW-7TPF+ 2x 4 port internal SAS horizontal, RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, 6, 50, 60, 1GB cache
 

Falloutboy

Member
Oct 23, 2011
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Has anyone tried Windows 8 storage spaces with a JBOD setup?

Hi all,

I have been running my striped setup on an IBM 1015 which I cross flashed with LSI Firmware and its given me no problems.
I am considering an ASRock Z11/Extreme AC for my next build with Windows 8 64 bit as the OS - now while I understand that this hardware is not setup for raid 5 and doesn't have a BBWC or Cache I am looking at trying the Windows 8 storage spaces Raid 5 and/or 6 equivalent. With this the system doesn't format the drives as you would expect for a raid setup - it uses them in JBOD and writes equally sized blocks to them, if a drive fails you still replace it and the blocks are rebuilt from the other drives. Essentially while it does use an LSI controller it would effectively use the CPU for the XORing operations.

Has anyone tried this setup or one similar? if so what are your experiences with it?
 

dba

Moderator
Feb 20, 2012
1,477
184
63
San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA
Hi all,

I have been running my striped setup on an IBM 1015 which I cross flashed with LSI Firmware and its given me no problems.
I am considering an ASRock Z11/Extreme AC for my next build with Windows 8 64 bit as the OS - now while I understand that this hardware is not setup for raid 5 and doesn't have a BBWC or Cache I am looking at trying the Windows 8 storage spaces Raid 5 and/or 6 equivalent. With this the system doesn't format the drives as you would expect for a raid setup - it uses them in JBOD and writes equally sized blocks to them, if a drive fails you still replace it and the blocks are rebuilt from the other drives. Essentially while it does use an LSI controller it would effectively use the CPU for the XORing operations.

Has anyone tried this setup or one similar? if so what are your experiences with it?
I like Windows storage spaces, and with storage tiers in Windows 2012R2 I expect to *really* like it, but I'd never use it with RAID5 or RAID6. Software parity RAID has a very bad reputation, and the Microsoft implementation has done nothing to improve it. Stick with mirroring when using Storage Spaces.
 

Fzdog2

Member
Sep 21, 2012
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My experience with 2012 Storage Spaces in parity mode turned out good and bad.
The good: dead simple to setup and use, great read speeds, love the add any size HDD feature.
The bad: terrible write speeds, HDD's would only use space up until the size of the smallest HDD in the pool.

I haven't tried the 2012 R2 updated Storage Spaces yet, as my drives are all on 9211-4i & 9750-4i in ZFS FreeNAS.
 

Scout255

Member
Feb 12, 2013
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I'd be interested to see if R2 improved parity performance. With the newly added RAID-6 equivelant abiilty it could be an interesting home use alternative as you could ocmbine it with a SSD for semi-fast & cheap home use storage.

However, this wouldn't really be possible unless they have improved read / write performance for parity spaces. I've read a lot of very dissapointing performance numbers (i.e. 20 MB/s for a 6 disk raid 5 kind of low) on 2012 storage spaces.
 

mrkrad

Well-Known Member
Oct 13, 2012
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HP sells a riser that is LSI 2308 IT mode, optional 512 BBWC with HP Virtual Smart Array! The dl360e has this option for 8 sas drives. It comes on the riser!