Migration path from LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-16i?

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smidley

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Feb 7, 2011
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I have an LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-16i (with BBU) and an HP SAS expander. I have 19x 2TB drives connected in a RAID 5. The RAID card is on it's way out though. I've been getting a lot of fatal firmware errors on it, and bad PHY errors. I need to determine a migration path off of this card and onto something else. What should I be looking at?

I would like to start a new array with larger drives and possibly sell some of the 2TB drives. My motherboard has on-board SAS connectors as well, but I'm not sure how good they are. Motherboard is a Tyan S7012.
 

chinesestunna

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Jan 23, 2015
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Basically LSI cards (branded ideally) will work fine. Are you running the RAID array using the hardware capabilities of the current card (most likely) or software raid on top? If H/W RAID then the onboard ports probably won't work but usually they are LSI chipset based as well
 

chinesestunna

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Jan 23, 2015
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19 drives in raid 5?!?! That's mildly insane.. Maybe three lots of 6 in raid 5 or something but 19 is risking a big loss..
I didn't want to ask but that bit made me very nervous as well, I went up to 8 drive RAID5 before going to 10 drive RAID6 because I was losing sleep
 
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smidley

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Feb 7, 2011
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I had them all in a RAID 6 before and then went back down to a RAID 5. This isn't critical information. I haven't had any issues with it until now when my controller started failing.
 

NetWise

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Jun 29, 2012
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Edmonton, AB, Canada
I had them all in a RAID 6 before and then went back down to a RAID 5. This isn't critical information. I haven't had any issues with it until now when my controller started failing.
The issue isn't in normal operation. It's during failure. The issue is that RAID5 will statistically have a read/write failure once in 13billion blocks or some such - around 13tb or whatever (going from memory). So it will RUN just fine. But when a drive dies, you're 'statistically certain' to have a rebuild failure. At 19x2 you're pretty much guaranteed it'll never rebuild.

I'd do 3x6 disks stripes in RAID50 with a hot spare or RAID6 - still probably with a hot spare.

If the data truly doesn't matter that much then don't worry about the migration path. Move the disks over, create a new array and restore the data from however you're backing it up. If you're ALSO not backing it up.... :/

Anyway, you SHOULD be able to attach it to any similar or newer LSI based controller and 'import foreign config'.