LSI Owner's Thread (SAS/SATA HBA and RAID cards)

DarthRay said:
Hey all.

[snip]
1. What are your suggestions for good HDDs that are compatible with the 926x/928x?

2. Do I really need the 9280-8e? Could I .. 8087-to-8088 adapters?

Thanks!
Click to expand...

I've been looking into similar questions / scenarios -
1. It looks like the new(ish) Ultrastar 7K4000 drives do have TLER, and are available in upto 4TB capacities, and from what I read are suitable for RAID use. There are also 2TB and 3TB drives in this range. I assume that the 5K4000 drives would do the same. Supposedly this is a dying breed of drives - SATA + TLER + cheap is going away, probably to be replaced by SAS only + enterprise pricing.

2. Wondering the same - and I'm wondering why there's such a huge upcharge for external ports - anyone else know? I can't find any information about electrical differences between the two, and you can find 2 port brackets for $60 or so, plus the cost of the cables. I'm tempted to go with the 9265 myself.
 
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I'm wanting to do a RAID10 setup with 4 drives. I've got a board with PCI 3.0 if that makes any difference.

I've been digging through this post, but I'm getting lost as far as older models and newer.

If you were buying today with my needs, which card would you get for the most reliability?

Also, what HDD would you recommend for this setup?
 
So, I have a very frustrating experience with my 9211-8i.

Set Up:
9211-8i + Intel SAS Expander cards.
1 1TB OS drive, which is not in a RAID volume.
10 2TB drives in RAID10.
Windows Server 2008 R2

So, every once in a while, I notice the system slow down so much that it's totally unusable. I would be able to fix this by pulling out all of the RAID array drives from the chasis, rebooting the machine, and then plugging them back in. This would happen maybe once a month.

The most recent time, I was able to identify the specific disk that seemed to be causing the problem in the array. So I went out and bought a replacement. But for the life of me, I can't figure out how to tell the array to rebuild using the new disk. I set it up as a hotspare in the LSI "sas2ircu" utility. But I can't use the BIOS - when I go into the LSI card's bios, it totally freezes up. I flashed the latest firmware and BIOS, as well. No change in the freezing.

Anyone know how to force the card to rebuild a missing drive? I'm so lost and the manuals are totally unhelpful. I feel like this is the whole purpose of RAID - why is the interface to do it so miserable?
 
Just a quick question please guys ...

I've just received a Supermicro X9DRD-7LN4F motherboard, and I'm wanting to flash the onboard SAS controller [which is listed as LSI 2308] to IT mode.

There's no downloads on the LSI website listed specifically for the 2308 controller, but there's firmware for other LSI cards which use the same chipset.

EG - The LSI 9207-8i uses the LSISAS2308 controller, and there's v14 firmware available on their website.

http://www.lsi.com/channel/products/storagecomponents/pages/lsisas9207-8i.aspx

I'm assuming that firmware will be OK for flashing the onboard controller, but I just want to try and make sure before I attempt it.

Any advice on this one way or the other?
 
I don't know if it works with the non-IBM firmware cards, but there is a Windows app for the M1015 (rebranded 9211-8i) called Megaraid Storage Management that allows you to manage the card without getting into the BIOS. This looks to be the latest version - maybe worth a shot?

BuairtRi said:
So, I have a very frustrating experience with my 9211-8i.

Set Up:
9211-8i + Intel SAS Expander cards.
1 1TB OS drive, which is not in a RAID volume.
10 2TB drives in RAID10.
Windows Server 2008 R2

So, every once in a while, I notice the system slow down so much that it's totally unusable. I would be able to fix this by pulling out all of the RAID array drives from the chasis, rebooting the machine, and then plugging them back in. This would happen maybe once a month.

The most recent time, I was able to identify the specific disk that seemed to be causing the problem in the array. So I went out and bought a replacement. But for the life of me, I can't figure out how to tell the array to rebuild using the new disk. I set it up as a hotspare in the LSI "sas2ircu" utility. But I can't use the BIOS - when I go into the LSI card's bios, it totally freezes up. I flashed the latest firmware and BIOS, as well. No change in the freezing.

Anyone know how to force the card to rebuild a missing drive? I'm so lost and the manuals are totally unhelpful. I feel like this is the whole purpose of RAID - why is the interface to do it so miserable?
Click to expand...
 
young_einstein said:
Just a quick question please guys ...

I've just received a Supermicro X9DRD-7LN4F motherboard, and I'm wanting to flash the onboard SAS controller [which is listed as LSI 2308] to IT mode.

There's no downloads on the LSI website listed specifically for the 2308 controller, but there's firmware for other LSI cards which use the same chipset.

EG - The LSI 9207-8i uses the LSISAS2308 controller, and there's v14 firmware available on their website.

http://www.lsi.com/channel/products/storagecomponents/pages/lsisas9207-8i.aspx

I'm assuming that firmware will be OK for flashing the onboard controller, but I just want to try and make sure before I attempt it.

Any advice on this one way or the other?
Click to expand...

I think not using -o flag when updating it should check for compatibility
not sure on windows but...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=16-117-157&SortField=0&SummaryType=0&Pagesize=10&PurchaseMark=&SelectedRating=-1&VideoOnlyMark=False&VendorMark=&IsFeedbackTab=true&Page=2#scrollFullInfo

* Firmware update from within Linux
* sasflash -o -f (firmware).fw -b (bios).rom ; If you are unsure run this w/o the o and it will only helpfully tell you if the firmware blob matches the base hardware, but not flash it if the vendor doesn't match.
 
Hey all I got the Intel sasuc8i which is the re-badge of LSI SAS 3081E-R HBA

Has anyone used this card as just an 8 port adapter with a Samsung 830 SSD.
My link rate is at 1.5Gb/s the 830 supports 6Gb/s and the card itself supports 3Gb/s

My 4 western digital drives support 3Gb/s the card says the link speed is 3Gb/s

Currently the Samsung 830 is plugged into the onboard Marvell 91xx SATA 6G Controller
and Marvell bios screen shows link at 6Gb/s

My searching has turned up very little, and I am unsure how to go about fully diagnosing this issue.
My only lead so far is on the Samsung Nation website (a question about 1.5Gb/s with onboard controller) but I really feel that this issue is tied to the LSI card.

I would like to add more SSD for VMware but Sata II drives seem to be on the way out and I cant handle optical speeds.

Any recommendations for a decent entry level card that supports Sata III?

From what I have read some of the LSI cards say they support Sata III but only with SAS drives.
 
CyberKP4 said:
I'm wanting to do a RAID10 setup with 4 drives. I've got a board with PCI 3.0 if that makes any difference.

I've been digging through this post, but I'm getting lost as far as older models and newer.

If you were buying today with my needs, which card would you get for the most reliability?

Also, what HDD would you recommend for this setup?
Click to expand...

With a 4 disc array and R10, you could be on PCIe 1.0 and it wouldn't make a difference. What OS are you planning on using and what motherboard do you have? If there a particular reason you don't want to use onboard for R10?
 
BuairtRi said:
So, I have a very frustrating experience with my 9211-8i.

Set Up:
9211-8i + Intel SAS Expander cards.
1 1TB OS drive, which is not in a RAID volume.
10 2TB drives in RAID10.
Windows Server 2008 R2

So, every once in a while, I notice the system slow down so much that it's totally unusable. I would be able to fix this by pulling out all of the RAID array drives from the chasis, rebooting the machine, and then plugging them back in. This would happen maybe once a month.

The most recent time, I was able to identify the specific disk that seemed to be causing the problem in the array. So I went out and bought a replacement. But for the life of me, I can't figure out how to tell the array to rebuild using the new disk. I set it up as a hotspare in the LSI "sas2ircu" utility. But I can't use the BIOS - when I go into the LSI card's bios, it totally freezes up. I flashed the latest firmware and BIOS, as well. No change in the freezing.

Anyone know how to force the card to rebuild a missing drive? I'm so lost and the manuals are totally unhelpful. I feel like this is the whole purpose of RAID - why is the interface to do it so miserable?
Click to expand...

What motherboard are you using, and what slots are being used by which cards? If you pull out everything but video and the LSI, does the BIOS freeze resolve? Have you don't a MB BIOS reset?
 
dsystem said:
Hey all I got the Intel sasuc8i which is the re-badge of LSI SAS 3081E-R HBA

Has anyone used this card as just an 8 port adapter with a Samsung 830 SSD.
My link rate is at 1.5Gb/s the 830 supports 6Gb/s and the card itself supports 3Gb/s

My 4 western digital drives support 3Gb/s the card says the link speed is 3Gb/s

Currently the Samsung 830 is plugged into the onboard Marvell 91xx SATA 6G Controller
and Marvell bios screen shows link at 6Gb/s

My searching has turned up very little, and I am unsure how to go about fully diagnosing this issue.
My only lead so far is on the Samsung Nation website (a question about 1.5Gb/s with onboard controller) but I really feel that this issue is tied to the LSI card.

I would like to add more SSD for VMware but Sata II drives seem to be on the way out and I cant handle optical speeds.

Any recommendations for a decent entry level card that supports Sata III?

From what I have read some of the LSI cards say they support Sata III but only with SAS drives.
Click to expand...

The SASUC8i only supports 1.5 and 3.0 link states, so you will never be able to link at 6.0. As to the 1.5 link instead of 3.0, it has been known to happen with SAS HBA's with SATA drives (though usually happens with an expander in the mix). Try doing a complete reset of the board if you can.
 
I've got a M5014+BBU available if anybody wants to buy it before I send it back to the ebay seller. It wont do pass through and I realized that too late. :(
I wanted the BBU, but I guess I've got an M1015 on the way which I'll flash to IT mode. 5 disks in MDADM Raid 6, 9TB total. Old controller just was causing more headaches than it was worth (fucking rocketraid not supported by the linux kernel).
 
GLSauron said:
I've got a M5014+BBU available if anybody wants to buy it before I send it back to the ebay seller. It wont do pass through and I realized that too late. :(
I wanted the BBU, but I guess I've got an M1015 on the way which I'll flash to IT mode. 5 disks in MDADM Raid 6, 9TB total. Old controller just was causing more headaches than it was worth (fucking rocketraid not supported by the linux kernel).
Click to expand...

Ehh.. try testing a scratch/spare disk with a preexisting partition and create a single disk RAID0 with that drive in MSM, *supposedly* its nondestructive. Havent tested myself as I don't have that card to test with yet but someone I trust said he was able to take a bootable drive with windows on it, create a RAID0 with it in MSM, all the preexisting data was passed through fine; then deleted the RAID0 and was able to connect it back to plain motherboard SATA and boot no problem.

However the controller has gotta be marking the drive somewhere with meta, when/if I get an M5014 I'll test this out and see what sectors are changed in the process and any potential impact to determine whether or not its truly nondestructive. This is potentially a big deal since the M5014 supports control based spindown, which is something lacking on the M1015 and only worked AFAIK with a *nix filesystem managing the spindown from the host; Windows was just SOL with spindown on M1015 since MS SCSI driver doesn't pass ATA SLEEP through.
 
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for some reason I can't seem to find an option to make my HDDs JBODs - at the moment they all show up as 'unconfigured good'. I can turn them into virtual drives but that process means losing all my data! I find it odd that I cannot simply right-click on a drive & convert it to a jbod - this is all I have to do with my M1015's

edit: don't know if it makes a difference, but between controller & HDDs is an expander: Chenbro CK23601
 
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odditory said:
Ehh.. try testing a scratch/spare disk with a preexisting partition and create a single disk RAID0 with that drive in MSM, *supposedly* its nondestructive. Havent tested myself as I don't have that card to test with yet but someone I trust said he was able to take a bootable drive with windows on it, create a RAID0 with it in MSM, all the preexisting data was passed through fine; then deleted the RAID0 and was able to connect it back to plain motherboard SATA and boot no problem.

However the controller has gotta be marking the drive somewhere with meta, when/if I get an M5014 I'll test this out and see what sectors are changed in the process and any potential impact to determine whether or not its truly nondestructive. This is potentially a big deal since the M5014 supports control based spindown, which is something lacking on the M1015 and only worked AFAIK with a *nix filesystem managing the spindown from the host; Windows was just SOL with spindown on M1015 since MS SCSI driver doesn't pass ATA SLEEP through.
Click to expand...
I mean passthrough as in the card just presents the raw drive to the OS. The M5015 will only present logical drives to the OS, you can do a 1 drive R1, but you lose SMART and the like.

The M1015 just shows up as a controller and the raw drives are presented just fine.
 
Anyone know if it's possible to have 2x 9260-8i in the same system?
I can't seem to get the M5014+M5015 to read on a motherboard... It's either 1 or the other..


Edit: Nevermind, it was a motherboard issue.
 
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I've got a system with two brand new 9280-8es. One of the arrays had what it claimed was a bad drive, which I replaced, and allowed it rebuild the array overnight.

Now, when I boot the system up, the alarm goes off for some reason. I get a message in the log in MSM that reads something to the effect of "reminder: potential non-optimal configuration due" and cites the port where the bad drive was. There's no other indication of a problem, other than that the alarm goes off.

Both cards in the system are running firmware 12.12.0-0111. There is a newer version available; would upgrading to that fix the problem, you think?

I'm hesitant to mess with the firmware, as I have a third card (a spare, for emergency repairs in the field) that I'd have to flash as well, and getting at the internals of the computer portion of this system is sort of a pain, as it's now mounted in a ruggedized rackmount enclosure.
 
Lsi 8408e here; powering 5 Hitachi 2TB drives. Gave me quite a scare yesterday when it completely crapped out... ended up being a disconnected power plug on my 5 bay enclosure - go figure o_O
 
so is the hardware and or software key necessary for Raid 6 on the 9260-8i? I'm a little confused by all the literature. If yes should I have any problems moving my existing R6 array from a SAS1078 card to this 2108 based?
 
I Just got the 9260-8i and the iBBU07 for it.
This battery won't charge beyond 67% unless I start a manual learn cycle.
Triggering the learn cycle then quickly fully charges the battery then discharges
and starts the learn cycle.
Contacted lsi support but still awaiting instructions, they mentioned that I may have
to downgrade firmware.
Anyone heard of this situation before?

Thanks
 
Zuess said:
I Just got the 9260-8i and the iBBU07 for it.
This battery won't charge beyond 67% unless I start a manual learn cycle.
Triggering the learn cycle then quickly fully charges the battery then discharges
and starts the learn cycle.
Contacted lsi support but still awaiting instructions, they mentioned that I may have
to downgrade firmware.
Anyone heard of this situation before?

Thanks
Click to expand...

That's called band-gap charging and it will increase the life of the battery.
 
black6spdz said:
so is the hardware and or software key necessary for Raid 6 on the 9260-8i? I'm a little confused by all the literature. If yes should I have any problems moving my existing R6 array from a SAS1078 card to this 2108 based?
Click to expand...

If it's an LSI branded MegaRAID controller, then no, RAID 5 and RAID 6 functionality do not require a key. Some OEM branded devices may require a key.

As far as RAID migration from SAS1078 to SAS2108, possibly, but this has nothing to do with RAID 6 keys -- the DDF may be different with a RAID 6 parity from 1 RoC to the other.
 
I'm having an issue with my SAS3801E card. I've got a SE3016 hooked up to it, and it's only seeing 8 of the drives. In the lsiutil it's showing the 9th drive, but it has this "5001940000424208 8 0013 0009 SATA Target, not present"

I've updated the firmware, but it's still showing the same thing. Anyone have any ideas?
 
I bought 2 LSI 9271-8i cards, Dell OEM versions dirt cheap. I noticed that it doesn't come with a BBU - if the machine is hooked up to a UPS can I run the card without it without jeopardizing my data?
 
hellosky said:
I bought 2 LSI 9271-8i cards, Dell OEM versions dirt cheap. I noticed that it doesn't come with a BBU - if the machine is hooked up to a UPS can I run the card without it without jeopardizing my data?
Click to expand...

Will it even let you turn on writeback cache without a BBU?

If its for personal use id say you are probably fine.. if this is enterprise i would say get the BBU. UPS units do fail.
 
Will it even let you turn on writeback cache without a BBU?
Click to expand...

Without the BBU I expect the the raid controller will default to write through cache to protect you from data loss. Write through cache will make random writes on raid5/6 much slower than write back.
 
Hello fellow LSI owners,

I run a CentOS server which hosts Plex and other goodies and have actually miraculously got my LSI 9211-8i running on an old nForce 680i SLI motherboard with a Core 2 Quad. After running into so many issues with getting the motherboard to recognize the LSI card, I'm a bit weary about future motherboard compatibility.

I will soon be upgrading the CPU to an i7 2600k and I was curious to know of any good/bad experiences all you experts have had with LGA 1155 socket motherboards and this LSI card.

I was considering a Gigabyte board since we have a few of them in desktops at work and they seem reliable, but I read that one of their variants hates HBA cards. I kind of have an axe to grind with Asus, but I'd rather trust your input than my bias.

Thanks a lot for your time and input!
 
biossearch said:
Hello fellow LSI owners,

I run a CentOS server which hosts Plex and other goodies and have actually miraculously got my LSI 9211-8i running on an old nForce 680i SLI motherboard with a Core 2 Quad. After running into so many issues with getting the motherboard to recognize the LSI card, I'm a bit weary about future motherboard compatibility.

I will soon be upgrading the CPU to an i7 2600k and I was curious to know of any good/bad experiences all you experts have had with LGA 1155 socket motherboards and this LSI card.

I was considering a Gigabyte board since we have a few of them in desktops at work and they seem reliable, but I read that one of their variants hates HBA cards. I kind of have an axe to grind with Asus, but I'd rather trust your input than my bias.

Thanks a lot for your time and input!
Click to expand...


I've has trouble with Gigabyte boards and LSI in the 1155 generation. I've have good luck with MSI boards with LSI cards and they tend to be my choice any more.
 
biossearch said:
Hello fellow LSI owners,

I run a CentOS server which hosts Plex and other goodies and have actually miraculously got my LSI 9211-8i running on an old nForce 680i SLI motherboard with a Core 2 Quad. After running into so many issues with getting the motherboard to recognize the LSI card, I'm a bit weary about future motherboard compatibility.

I will soon be upgrading the CPU to an i7 2600k and I was curious to know of any good/bad experiences all you experts have had with LGA 1155 socket motherboards and this LSI card.

I was considering a Gigabyte board since we have a few of them in desktops at work and they seem reliable, but I read that one of their variants hates HBA cards. I kind of have an axe to grind with Asus, but I'd rather trust your input than my bias.

Thanks a lot for your time and input!
Click to expand...
I found horrible stability problems with a gigabyte GA-Z87-UD5H with LSI cards.

I ended up swapping to Supermicro instead - which has been been rock solid.
 
Hello.
I just got an LSI HBA 9207-8I
It is on my x16 pci-e 2.0 slot (I have 3, 1 with video card on it, 1 unused, and this lsi in the 3rd).
MOBO is Asus Rampage III Formula.
Drives: OS=Samsung 850 Pro 512 D: = Corsair 250gb ssd, E: = 2TB WD Black F: = WD 1tb blue
Reason for lsi card is some sata ports are going bad on the mobo.

I have all my drives on it (2ssd 2hdd), dvd is on the intel controller sata (X58 mobo, marvell controllers not used, as they crash win7 64 when booting), and the drives are working. It boots, and everything works.

BUT
The LSI card shows that it is in IDE mode?
Before I put the card in, and changed drives to it, it used to be in AHCI mode (onboard mobo sata ports).

I dont seem to be able to change the mode via the lsi card bios.

This is the first time I have ever used an add-in card, let alone one with its own bios.
Can someone help me with making the drives faster?
My 4k speeds are 2.9MB writes, which is killing me.
On my other machine (with all ports being real sata6, ahci, uefi bios), I am getting 77MB 4k writes.

Thanks for any info.
Dave
 
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