RAID0 : HBA or SW RAID ?

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XZed

New Member
Feb 3, 2011
66
0
0
Hello,

I always used HW RAID and setup various cards (LSI mainly) w/ BBU.

Currently, some low-cost RAID cards remains and i'd like to use them on my personal rigs.

On a previous rig, i tested this setup :

3 * SSD + LSI 9260-4i (WB mode) : ~ 600 MB/s read.

I had to move the LSI to another rig.

It remains some cheap RAID cards : IBM M1015, IBM BR10i, Dell H200, etc.

All of these are : No Cache / No BBU.

My read speed slows down to 200/250 MB/s due to WT mode.

I tried to force WT without success on these cards.

But, i was very surprised by mobilenvidia's M1015 experiences reaching 1 to 2GB/s speeds :eek:...

Even w/ 4 SSD i can't imagine that in WT mode...

So my questions :

- Is there anyway to enable WT mode on these cards (i tried disk cache but don't really see a difference) ?

- For my need (max throughput / RAID0), do i have to simply use onboard ports w/ Intel Matrix Manager (i remember that write cache could be enabled contrarily to these RAID cards) ?

Thank you.
 

mobilenvidia

Moderator
Sep 25, 2011
1,956
212
63
New Zealand
This seems to have slipped through my net.

WT = Write though this is the default and only mode for LSI9211/9240/M1015 etc.
No cache = no ability to write back.

There should be no slow down with using the M1015(LSI9240/9211) in RAID0 or the LSI9260 in RAID0.

Max through put with more than 2x drives, get the M1015 then use Windows software RAID/striping