Lenovo ThinkSystem RAID 930-8i

tophus

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May 29, 2009
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Hello,

I am hoping to gain further clarification around the 930-8i raid card.

I have had various raid cards since the perc 5/i, through IBM 5015 and various other LSI varients.. I now have the itch to upgrade..

I am currently running raid6, and want to continue to (yes I know ZFS is better but it doesnt suit my application).

Questions: Will the 930-8i:
1. Work in a generic/consumer motherboard like my previous cards (ie non-lenovo);
2. Take any sata hard disks I through at it, perhaps specifically some Seagate Ironwolf 8TB disks.

I have seen the thread by ComSpitfire2020 https://hardforum.com/threads/144tb...win10-raid6-lenovo-raid-930-8i-avago.2004851/ which suggests the answer to both of my questions are yes, but that is quite literally the only confirmation I can find on hardforum/servethehome/reddit/youtube/google - so frustrating!

Thanks a bunch! This is such a great community with such a wealth of information, and such voluminous content for me to procrastinate trawling through :)
 
I cannot answer definitively; I do not have a 930-8i card. I haven't encountered vendor locking - either for drives or for server - on the IBM cards, up through the 5025 or so, but I haven't used one more recently than that.

With that said, is there a reason you're specifically targeting the 930-8i instead of just a generic card running the SAS3508 chip? Something like the 9460-8i would not have any of those questions, because it's intentionally vendor neutral.
 
I cannot answer definitively; I do not have a 930-8i card. I haven't encountered vendor locking - either for drives or for server - on the IBM cards, up through the 5025 or so, but I haven't used one more recently than that.

With that said, is there a reason you're specifically targeting the 930-8i instead of just a generic card running the SAS3508 chip? Something like the 9460-8i would not have any of those questions, because it's intentionally vendor neutral.
It doesnt seem that IBM/Lenovo have vendor locked, unlike at least Dell.. the reason I want to skip beyond the 5200 series is the lack of raid6 without the FOD (firmware on demand) which seems like a headache... this takes me to your second point, a 930-8i is substantially cheaper from ebay (newish, pulled from new system) rather than an LSI 9460-8i..
 
930-8i is substantially cheaper from ebay (newish, pulled from new system) rather than an LSI 9460-8i..
Ah. When I looked them up, they were relatively close in price. Personally I'm just running a 9265-8i, since all the drives in my array are mechanical and I'm using it for bulk storage rather than raw combined speed of the array. And the card was $50, which is hard to argue with.
 
HEY ... iam ruinning exactly this controller - its working with every drive and delivers a huge performance. you got my full recommendation. iam so glad to see someone is googelign the 930-8i :)
 

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Ahh thank you!
An ebay seller has confirmed this for me also so I have placed my order. Hopefully anyone googling can now find this thread!
Long live hardware raid!!!
 
Hello,
googling whether lenovo 930-8i running on non-lenovo hardware, I found this post. In my opinion it should work, but the dealer won‘t confirm. Do you have some experience you can share with me? I would like to use the controller with a Supermicro board. Do you know something about firmware, software or cachefault modul. Are parts from LSI 9460-8i useable btw. flashable?
 
I believe that it is going to work, as per ComSpitfire2020's experience

I am yet to test mine out as I am still awaiting the arrival of cables from a certain online store that seems to take months to ship! I will post an update of my experience here then.

regarding flashing, no idea, I probably wont touch mine.

According to lenovo it has CacheVault, but does not support cachecade.
https://lenovopress.com/lp0652-thinksystem-raid-930-series-internal-raid-adapters/
Thanks for your reply, hope you'll get the cables soon.

About flashing the controller I agree with you, it should be only a last way to solve problems.

But I am not sure what to think about lenovopress: they write about flash cache protection by a CacheVault Power Module supercapacitor, but no idea whether it is shipped with the card or is an option like with LSI. Some ebay sellers deal with second hand cards and emphasize that it comes with the supercapacitor. All pictures from Lenovo only show the single controller with no CVM.

Although at the end of the feature list they write "Note: Megaraid CacheCade and Megaraid Storage Manager is not supportet" but ComSpitfire2020's screenshot shows a running Storage Manager by Avago.
 
Thats interesting..

Perhaps CacheCade would work as an unsupported feature either through Megaraid Storage Manager or through a reflash..
 
to anyone trawling the depths looking for answers, the Lenovo 930-8i works perfectly in my system with a normal consumer motherboard (Z490, in the pci-e x4 slot with a GPU running x16 in its own slot). seagate consumer HDDS also.. so highly recommended if you can get your hands on one cheap on ebay.
 
Hi everybody, I would like to add a question here: I bought a used Lenovo 930-8i and am trying to configure it on a Asus P10S-E/4L board to use RAID 1 with two SSDs and install ESXi. The RAID bios is showing up correctly after installing the RAID controller and it also shows the drives but no key combination to log into the pre-boot configuration tool is shown. I tried all key combinations I could find in various dokumentations (F1 through F12; Ctrl+R; Ctrl+H, C; Ctrl+L; Ctrl+X; amongst others). I tried turning on UEFI but then POST does not find the controller and it is not listed anywhere in the Asus motherboard bios. I sticked the controller into another PC and am able to configure the Raid controller via LSI Storage Authority for Windows. Any ideas how I can configure the controller in the pre boot scenario?
Thank you for any advice.
 
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