Which RAID Card?

[FusionX9]

Greetings All,

I have been reading many of the forums and great articles by mobilenvidia for months. I purchased an IBM M1015 and crosflashed it to the LSI IT/IR firmware and currently have it running in my ESXI 5.5 hypervisor box with 32gb of ram and a haswell 4770s i7 with a couple 2TB seagate spinners in RAID 0. I also have a 256gb Crucial M4 for zippy VMs. (Planning on getting a couple Samsung 840 Evo 1TB in the future for RAID 1) Without any cache obviously RAID 1/0 isn't all that great and it has no battery backup, but it was great to learn on and actually helped me on a job with a Dell server later.

I have tried really hard to read through many of the available articles and narrow down an upgrade but I end up feeling rather overwhelmed.

Prerequisites: I want to upgrade to a new raid card with 512mb-1TB of cache memory, have cachecade/fastpath so I can do SSD caching as well as a battery backup/capacitor as well as support ESXI 5.5. I am just running RAID for my vsphere server and VMs, and am not interested in doing passthrough or setting up a NAS. I have a budget of about $300, maybe a bit more for a good deal. I want two SAS ports internally for two sets of forward breakout cables to expand later. I will used this as a learning platform for trying different things and expand my knowledge of RAID.

I have been watching the IBM M5016 cards but i'm not sure if that is the best option because I don't think it supports some of the above prerequisites and after reading a few articles it seems I can do better although I do like the capacitor vs a BBU that wears out. Any insights or thoughts are much appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[Patrick]

When you say 512MB to 1TB is that really 1TB (guessing there you would use a SSD) or 1GB (in which case it is RAM?)

 

[FusionX9]

Yep mistype. 512mb-1gb of RAM cache on the RAID card. Thanks Patrick.

 

[MiniKnight]

What about this? New LSI MegaRAID 9260CV 8i LSI00282 8 Port w 512MB Cache Cachevault RAID Card | eBay

Under your budget.

 

[MiniKnight]

Or this one... Intel LSI 9286CV 8E RS25SB008 6GB s PCI E SAS RAID Controller 1GB Cachevault | eBay

 

[FusionX9]

Thanks for the replies. Would either of those come with the ability built in to do SSD caching?

 

[FusionX9]

Second card is for an external array I need internal connectors.

 

[Clownius]

Thanks for the replies. Would either of those come with the ability built in to do SSD caching?

I have a few 9260's and a 9280 they offer SSD caching as an option in the BIOS thingy. I have not tried it though so cant confirm it works

 

[Darkytoo]

I would stay away from 9260s with SSDs. I along with a bunch of other members on this site have had less than satisfactory luck with SSD speed. I have a 9260 right now running a raid 50 array with cachecade on it, and it benchmarks faster than a 3 drive raid-0 array of SSD drives. I think part of the problem was that I didn't have a battery installed on the card, so even though I told it to use write-back cache, my suspicion is it wouldn't and that caused part of the slow speed. I've got an LSI 9271 on order that should be here any minute, which should fix the problem as it has fastpath included already, PCIe 3.0 and it has the faster processor. You can get a brand new one from amazon for $520 in a retail box. You can get it a little cheaper on eBay, but if you end up with an OEM controller, forget any technical support from LSI. Also make sure and DO NOT buy an LSI 9270, as it doesn't support cachevault, which you can also get for almost the same price as a battery on amazon and according to LSI tech support the batteries only last 1-2yrs at most, while cachevault lasts much longer.

I asked LSI about my SSD speed issues on the 9260 while they were helping me on another ticket, and the engineer stated that the 9260 isn't really designed for SSDs and you'll saturate the controller and the PCIe bus with only 2-3 SSD drives, don't know if that's true, but that's what I was told.

 

[Clownius]

I do have the BBU's on mine. I should run some tests with SSD's but i dont have in use currently. Not to mention my boards are all older and run PCIe 2 in any case. Maybe grab a 9271 and compare them.

 

[MiniKnight]

PCI-E 2.0 x8 = like 4GB per second. You aren't going to saturate the bus with three SSDs. Maybe 6-8 using purely a large sequential read pattern... in RAID 0.

The reason @Darkytoo your array is slow is because the cards are setup to do parity writes that go host ----> RAID RAM ----> disks as they are ready. In theory the RAM acts as a write buffer aggresgating smaller blocks. That does not happen without the write cache. Example -you are taking say a 8KB block and splittin it across three drives. That would be like 2.6KB each drive which is not any cell size. RAID 5 sucks if you do not do that aggregation up front.

 

[FusionX9]

Bump and thanks for the information Miniknight, Clownius and Darkytoo! I am looking for good to great raid performance. As well as a card that is designed to run with SSDs and would not get saturated from data transfers. I'm eventually planning not to have spinners at all. I am eager to hear more of your thoughts! I'm still narrowing down a replacement for my M1015.

 

[FusionX9]

I'll look into a 9271 with the cachevault capacitor and do some reading. My motherboard does support pcie 3.0.

 

[FusionX9]

It looks like this is the one I would want.

• LSI MegaRAID SAS 9271-8iCC 2x4 ports SAS internal horizontal, 1GB DDR3 cache, BBU capable, RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, 6, 50, 60, Comes with CacheCade Pro v2 and Fastpath

Any downsides? This one looks like it would give me plenty of room to grow, as well as help me learn SSD caching and Fast Path. Anyone know where I can find a good price? Looks like around $1k for card/features/capacitor. VMware ESXI 5.5 supported.

 

[Chuckleb]

I have that card/combo. Actually have the 8i and added CC later on. I think CC only helps for platters, you won't gain much with SSDs. I also think that all cards now have FP as part of a BIOS update. There is a thread on here somewhere. You might only need the 4i as well if you are running all SATA since you don't get the dual path in SATA. Not sure if you will saturate one port.

Just looking at ways to save you $. I would go 9271-8i without CC.

 

[Darkytoo]

I got mine off of Amazon. Brand new 9271 8i was only $520 brand new retail box. Be careful of the "Cheap" ebay deals, I got my 9260 off ebay and it's an OEM, LSI told me to call dell for support or return it for a retail. So far i've been very happy with the performance. I had an issue with a defective SSD that once it was resolved I am up to almost 2000MB/S sequential. Fastpath comes standard now, and cachecade is useless without platter drives. I got the capacitor off of amazon also for about $180, much better than a battery.

 

[FusionX9]

Thanks Chuckleb and Darkytoo! Looks like I've narrowed it down to the 9271 8i without cachecade and a cache vault capacitor. Now I just need to find a good deal on amazon etc. thanks for the help everyone!