Rocketraid needs to be retired, software or IBM/LSI replacement

[Ncah08]

Hi all,

I don't have much experience with Raid set ups so was hoping someone here may be able to steer me in the right direction. I had a machine built about 5 years ago to run plex media server and also for doing basic windows tasks every now and again. Has been working great but in the last year or so I have been having more and more issues with the raid card so I am looking at alternative options. Main issue has been the card flagging drives as degraded very regularly which I thought was just the age of the drives but I have now had a couple that were quite new and the most recent failure was only 1 month old. Most of the failed drives I have removed from the raid and tested with Crystal Disk Info and HD Sentinel and they show as 100% health but raid will not change degraded status. The raid has also had occasions where it just labels drives as missing, sometimes working again after a few reboots. In both instances, formatting the drives is only way to get raid to work with the drives again. Also, when the RR has a single drive issue and in critical status, it seems to cause windows issues as machine sometimes gets stuck a windows booting screen with circle spinning or once up and running it will cause system to freeze and restart (boot disk is separate to the raid).

The machine is built with the following hardware running on Windows 10 Pro: AMD FX-8320; ASRock 970 Extreme 3-R2; Asus GeForce GT 610; Corsair CMY16GX3M2A1600C9 (2x 8GB 1600mhz DDRIII); Samsung EVO 128GB boot disk. Currently I have a RocketRaid 2720sgl with 5 WD Red 3TB HDDs running RAID 5. I have all critical data backed up elsewhere but just want to get plex media library stable again. Migrating is also not an issue as RR recently decided it would have problems with a second drive as was rebuilding so everything was wiped as had to completely rebuild.

I have been looking at 2 hardware replacement options or alternatively using the mobo raid but am not sure what is the best route to take, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Option 1: IBM M5015 LSI 9260-8i 46M0851 81Y4419 SAS RAID Controller PCI-E +Battery

IBM M5015 LSI 9260-8i 46M0851 81Y4419 SAS RAID Controller PCI-E +Battery | eBay

ETA 3 to 8 busines. We keep our promises that we will provide you with the best solution within 24 hours.

www.ebay.com

Option 2: IBM M5016 Controller Raid SAS/SATA PCIe 6GB 1G cache with battery =LSI 9265-8i

IBM M5016 Controller Raid SAS/SATA PCIe 6GB 1G cache with battery =LSI 9265-8i | eBay

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for IBM M5016 Controller Raid SAS/SATA PCIe 6GB 1G cache with battery =LSI 9265-8i at the best online prices at eBay!

www.ebay.com.au

Option 3: use the mobo

I am not sure about the 2 eBay items as they list both IBM and LSI model numbers, I can see on the forums some have had issues with getting similar cards working as LSI or some features were not available on the non-lsi cards.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

[j_h_o]

Have you ruled out any backplane issues? Do you have a backplane between the controller and the drives? Or are the drives directly attached to the controller?

What chassis is this in, and have you ruled out any power supply issues?

 

[Ncah08]

Hi,

Directly attached via 2x SFF-8087 Mini SAS cables. Enclosure is a CoolerMaster RC‑K282‑KKN1 Gaming Case. I had a power supply fail after 3 years or so and current PSU is about a year old, SilverStone ET750-G 750W Gold 80Plus Essential Power Supply. There is no other symptoms of a powersupply issue and more than enough capacity in the unit for what it is currently running, also previously had 6 HDDs running fine and only 5 now.

Thanks

 

[stamasd]

The M5015 will do raid5 out-of-the-box, however drivers for running it under Win10... nonexistent AFAIK. Unless you're willing to switch to Linux - or an older Windows like Server 2012, I don't think it's what you're looking for.
I can't say anything about the M5016, I have no experience with it.

 

[Ncah08]

The M5015 will do raid5 out-of-the-box, however drivers for running it under Win10... nonexistent AFAIK. Unless you're willing to switch to Linux - or an older Windows like Server 2012, I don't think it's what you're looking for.
I can't say anything about the M5016, I have no experience with it.

Thanks. I guess that's kind of what I am trying to figure out. I can see here: Support Documents and Downloads that Win 10 drivers are available for MegaRaid 9265-8i but just unsure if it will work on the IBM product. Or am I missing something with the dual branding IBM/LSI on these products?

 

[stamasd]

Sorry, can't give you advice on that one. Not only I'm not familiar with the M5016/9265 but also I'm not a Windows guy. I only use Linux for storage boxes.

 

[Lost-Benji]

Any cheap LSI based RAID card will do nicely. Otherwise, if just media storage, StorageSpaces is an option, slow write speeds though.

 

[Ncah08]

Any cheap LSI based RAID card will do nicely. Otherwise, if just media storage, StorageSpaces is an option, slow write speeds though.

Thanks, yeah I was looking at the option of StorageSpaces or the mobo inbuilt AMD raid but doesn't look like can add cache easily but I guess the current RocketRaid doesn't have either. Also not sure of how beneficial cache would be as have not previous had hardware with that function. Write speed isn't really too critical as only used to store plex library.

Think I will try the M5016/LSI 9265-8i and just hope I can run megaraid on my Windows 10 machine and not compatibility issues with the ASRock 970 mobo.

 

[Navy_BOFH]

Thanks, yeah I was looking at the option of StorageSpaces or the mobo inbuilt AMD raid but doesn't look like can add cache easily but I guess the current RocketRaid doesn't have either. Also not sure of how beneficial cache would be as have not previous had hardware with that function. Write speed isn't really too critical as only used to store plex library.

Think I will try the M5016/LSI 9265-8i and just hope I can run megaraid on my Windows 10 machine and not compatibility issues with the ASRock 970 mobo.

I was running a 9260-16i but battery is nowhere to be found. I went to UNraid which means no more hardware RAID for me, but the card is available.