LSI-9260-8i battery needed?

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natan-

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I just ordered an LSI-9260-8i to run raid 6 on 8x 1.5TB Seagate drives. Should I get the battery add-on? What do I lose other than a little more piece of mind? I am already running a ups...
 
I don't think it's needed if you have UPS already, but I don't even dare ask someone do persuade me not to get it.
I mean I would hate to loose THAT much data over what could be considered a small additional investment.

But yes they are to expensive for what they are... :(
 
The way I look at it, the UPS completely negates the expensive little POS battery they want you to buy. I run my array on a system with a UPS that will shut the system down safely after a few minutes of no power, and have never had a problem with data loss.
 
Hmmm.... don't teasme to save money on this! :D
Are there any other glitches that may pass through even if we run UPS and cause faults that could be prevented if one has a BBU?
 
If you've got a good UPS (i.e. one that keeps the system running when the power goes out) then the battery on the RAID card won't ever be used. Check out the adaptec 5-Z series cards, or at least the advertising for them with the capacitor that keeps the cache alive long enough to write to flash storage; even they don't like batteries anymore :p
 
Flash on a card sounds great!
But I can't see many going that route... the profit on the BBU is just to tempting for them :(
 
Will the LSI allow you to do RAID migration/expansion etc. without a battery?
I know that HP controllers don't allow these actions unless a battery is installed.
 
That's a very good question... Now that you mention it it is quite possible it won't.
Somebody should drop them a line with this question.
 
novadude said:
The way I look at it, the UPS completely negates the expensive little POS battery they want you to buy. I run my array on a system with a UPS that will shut the system down safely after a few minutes of no power, and have never had a problem with data loss.
Click to expand...

I agree that this is often not a problem. The problem comes when the power cord plugged into the machine is accidentally removed: no matter how big your UPS, it can't power your machine if the power cord comes out. That could mean a loss of everything in the card's memory, which is somewhere between Not a Big Deal and a Big Deal, depending on how much you care about your data.
 
i run mine without a battery backup raid0 with eight vertex. no problems. no ups either. some call me crazy, i call THEM crazy. i have lost power a few times, but never had any file problems. i know there is a chance of it,, but what most people dont realize is that it is a VERY small chance. if you backup regularly it is no more of a threat than anything else, like malware etc. actually you have a much higher risk from that than not having a BBU. the speed which the info runs through the cache is neglible anyways. i actually run my cache settings on direct, as it gives you less latency for ssd usage.
 
If all goes well I should be able to build up my system this weekend. I'll check for any options that are greyed out. Or will the battery only options not even be shown without the battery installed?
 
the only option that you cannot use without battery backup on the LSI is the "write back with BBU" setting. basically there are three settings for writeback
NONE- self explanatory
Write-back- this enables the write back cache without a battery backup, it is a slimmer cache setting,. it does not hold the info in the cache as long.
Write back with BBU-it enables longer holding of info in the cache.
you can manually change the cache refresh speed in the bios of the card though,. the default without BBU is refresh every four seconds. i think that the reason that they have the three settings and the write back without battery unit is so that it minimizes the chance of data loss. i have never lost anything. the odds of losing info are very small. really only enterprise users with zero tolerance for data loss should be concerned to a large extent.
 
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Computurd said:
i run mine without a battery backup raid0 with eight vertex. no problems. no ups either. some call me crazy, i call THEM crazy. i have lost power a few times, but never had any file problems.
Click to expand...
Just because your filesystem doesn't do any checking of its data doesn't mean there are no problems... just that they're harder to detect.
Computurd said:
i know there is a chance of it,, but what most people dont realize is that it is a VERY small chance. if you backup regularly it is no more of a threat than anything else, like malware etc. actually you have a much higher risk from that than not having a BBU. the speed which the info runs through the cache is neglible anyways. i actually run my cache settings on direct, as it gives you less latency for ssd usage.
Click to expand...
Direct IO is a good start. Are you using write-through (data goes to disk before it's called committed) or write-back (data goes to memory before it's called committed)? Can you even run write-back without a battery?
 
yes, you can run write back without a battery. you can do it on the areca 1680-ix too. you can also do it with the rocket raid 4320 AND 3520.
 
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