Looking for a raid controller

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: Looking for a raid controller

Dayummmm, hope it's worth it!

Maybe should have waited for the many PCIE SSD's that are about to come out instead?

[Acebmxer]

Re: Looking for a raid controller

Not looking good.... Need help. I just got the LSI 9240-4i the box was sealed nicely nothing to suspect anything. I opened the box and pulled the raid card out in its anti static bang and it was sealed nicely, so I thought. I went to break the seal and when it ripped it reveled that it was sealed twice. it looks like it was two new seals so I cant say that it was a open item or referb or used. Any how I installed the card into the X58A-OC board as the X58A-UD5 that its supposed to go into does not have windows directly installed so I can not update the firmware on the controller if needed.

I first installed the raid card into the very last PCI-e slot and turned on the system and the system booted but the raid card did not show during boot. I checked device manager and no new hardware. I then shut the system down and installed the card into the 3rd slot the same slot you would use if running crossfire. Still the card does not show. I do have access to my old EP45-UD3P that I could try the card in.


Should the card work in a 16x slot just operate at 8x? The OC board is on F4c bios I think after all the 4G button testing. I could try to flash back to F5d or e.

Maybe card is bad or incompatible. Last test I will try the card in the X58A-UD5 just to see if it is detected by the board and/or esxi.

[Acebmxer]

Re: Looking for a raid controller

ok sorry for panic mode its over now. After flashing bios to F5b the card is now supported.

As for the UD5 it is on bios FF1 US. Should be the same bios as FF1 just with VT-D support added. Bios FF3 does not support booting into ESXi 5.0 from USB thumb drive or from hdd so I am kinda stuck on this bios.

First let me get the card bios updated if needed then ill try it in the UD5.

[chrisram]

Re: Looking for a raid controller

Yeah, you might have to play BIOS shuffle since you are using a very specilized app.

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: Looking for a raid controller

Nice to see you got it working@! And yes, you can use it in a x16 slot, but it'll cut down your graphics lanes still if it's a shared slot.

Sometimes that causes issues in itself, but yes in a working environment with all things being compatible and playing nicely you can use like that. So, now that you've been playing for hours, how's it working so far?

[Acebmxer]

Re: Looking for a raid controller

Well after playing with it for a bit last night here is where I am at.

Installed the card into the UD5, attached the 4 hdd's and fired it up. Bios detected the card and the card detected the drives as well. I tried to enter the cards bios to configure the raid array but it would not let me enter. I was able to enter the cards bios when it was installed on the OC with no drives connected.

I was able to enable passthru for the controller and passed it along the VM, which saw the card also. I installed the drivers for the card and the software to control the card. Using that software I was able to create the raid array, but I selected a option to check the disk or something and now I ran into trouble. Card is still being seen by the host(UD5) and host os ESXI and VM but VM is getting a error code 10 can not start the device and has a yellow triangle next to it. I tried moving the card from one VM to another and still the other VM can not start the card. I have tried rebooting the server and still no luck.

My next step is to pull the card from the UD5 and install into the OC and check. Also might have to pull the 4 drives and card and configure everything on the OC and them move it back to the UD5.

[Acebmxer]

Re: Looking for a raid controller

well back again, this time with good news.

First I tried everything I could in the UD5. When drives are disconnected I could enter raid bios util but it yelled about the drives not being there. Tried reconnecting the drives and seeing if the card would start under the VM os. Of coarse it did not, so then I tried moving the card to another slot and still no go. As for the error that I was seeing, I still could not read the whole error but I did see something mention about Orom. SO I thought about he error of Too many Oroms being load. Entered bios disabled Intel raid and disabled the gstat2 ports. The error went way but still would not allow me to enter the util.


Next thing was to put the raid card in the OC board with the drives. Luckly I bought a 1 meter cable so I was able to plug the card into the OC board while still conntect to the drives in the UD5. On boot up it still did not allow me to enter the util but windows started and I was able to access the controller though the windows util. Raid card showed a couple of errors, decided to reflash the bios and start over again.

On reboot with no array created it will allow you to enter the bios util. I was not able to figure out how to create the raid 10 array only raid 5. So I exit that util and let the system boot and used the windows util. That I was able to recreate array get it initialize and formatted. I did a bench mark of the drives while still in the OC board and looked good.



Now I have the raid card back in the UD5 card is being seen by the host UD5, host OS ESXi, and the Vm. All is working great, now just to start copying all my data back to the drives. Should only take a few hrs.

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: Looking for a raid controller

Are you using RAID 5 on purpose? Haha, just wondering, I always like to see R0 results!

Hopefully you can get this all figured out and working how you want it eventually!

[Acebmxer]

Re: Looking for a raid controller

No not using raid 5, thats all I could get out of the raid bios util for what ever reason. So I used the windows Util to create the raid 10 array. That screen shot is raid 10 config. All is setup finally just waiting for all my files to be copied.

One thing I did notice with the card, it has a tiny heat sink on it and with a IR gun it reads about 45-50c on the surface. I think I might have to get a small fan for it.

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: Looking for a raid controller

Hmm, did you RTFM? Just giving ya a hard time, can you feel it?

Surely it can do R0 since you can do R5 and R10, somethings gotta give in the BIOS - squeeze it again but harder this time!

[Acebmxer]

Re: Looking for a raid controller

Yeah the manual that came with the card is a single sheet of paper fold in four. Insert card install driver set up raid. They make it sound like a 5th grader could do it :) I guess Im not as smart as a 5th grader.

I have run all 4 drives in a raid0 back when it was on the intel controller. I did not see much better speeds compaired to raid10.

Here is a little chart showing speed increase when adding disk to raid0.

4c. RAID-0 Performance Scaling With # of Drives
One of the things I have always hated seeing here is people who have RAID-0 arrays with 7 or 8 drives. Aside from the clear danger of disk failure, RAID-0 may scale well with a few drives, but much less so as you add more. For example, versus one disk and assuming theoretical maximums:

1 Disk = Baseline
2 Disks = 1/2 Time Decrease = 50% performance increase vs. 1 disk
3 Disks = 2/3 Time Decrease = 16% performance increase vs. 2 disks
4 Disks = 3/4 Time Decrease = 9% performance increase vs. 3 disks
5 Disks = 4/5 Time Decrease = 5% performance increase vs. 4 disks
6 Disks = 5/6 Time Decrease = 3% performance increase vs. 5 disks

And one must take into account the fact that as the number of drives increase, so too does the minimum size of the file required to be considered a "large" file. Add in the fact that overhead alone accounts for a few % of performance and you can see that past 3 disks your *theoretical maximum* increase is sitting in the low to mid single digit range.

RAID And You (A Guide To RAID-0/1/5/6/xx)

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: Looking for a raid controller

Ohh that's not cool, how about on the CD or at the website for it, isn't there and in depth PDF? Yes, I looked and it shows all levels, so you should have been able to choose zero as long as you had several drives installed
ftp://tsupport:[email protected]_9261_doc.zip

I think that quote must be old (Yes, 2007)! I see single speeds with one disk, double that with two, triple that with three, quadruple that with four, ect (Up to the limit of the bus used, but and only 4K Read speeds do not increase)