Legit Storage Reviews
LSI MegaRAID SATA and SAS 9260-8i RAID Card Review
| Manufacturer: | LSI |
| Product: | LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i |
| Date: | Tue, Jan 19, 2010 - 12:00 AM |
| Written By: | Chris Morrell - |
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LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-8i
The front of the LSI 9260-8i is quite busy with the majority of the important components in plain view. On the right side of the PCB are 5 800MHz DDR2 modules that provide 512mb of onboard cache. On the bottom right corner there is a connector for the battery backup unit (LSIBBU07) that provides the card with enough power to preserve the data in the onboard cache for up to 72 hours. To the left of the memory modules you have the onboard sound alarm, the heatsink covering the PowerPC RoC, and the two SFF 8087 connectors. The card has a PCIe 2.0 x8 slot but functions fine in an open-ended x4 slot or an x16 slot.
The backside of the card hasn't got anything of interest to us, just a smattering of ICs associated with providing functionality on the PCB.
Here you can see in better detail the two SFF 8087 connectors. Each connector is a 4 port SAS connection and in this review we will be using a fanout cable to support 4 devices on each connector. The 9260-8i supports a maximum of 32 devices through SAS port multipliers.
The hard drives I will be using today are Seagate's latest Cheetahs, the NS.2 series supporting SAS 6Gbps. I have four of these drives in the 600GB flavor. These will represent roughly the pinnacle of rotating disk drives with each drive providing upwards of 150MB/s in sequential reads and writes. In addition to being some of the fastest hard drives on the market, the NS.2 series drives are also some of the most energy efficient with typical power consumption reported at 9.75w and idle power consumption reported at 6.22w. These power consumption figures are achieved through dynamically shutting off portions of the drive logic board when not in use.
The solid-state drives I will be using today are the ACARD 9010 which is a DDR2 based RAM disk. Each ACARD 9010 features the ability to split the installed memory in half and function as two separate logical devices. By doing this with both ACARD 9010s I will have 4 logical SATA2 devices. For today's test I have 4GB of DDR2 installed in each ACARD 9010 yielding a total of 8GB between the two devices.
Here is the cable I used for my testing. These SFF 8482 connectors support both SATA and SAS and accept traditional SATA power cables to power the attached drives.
Next Page - Test Setup
| Review Index |
|
Page 1 - RAID Cards and You
Page 2 - LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-8i Page 3 - Test Setup Page 4 - RAID0 4kb Results Page 5 - RAID0 64kb Results Page 6 - RAID0 1024kb Results Page 7 - RAID5 4kb Results Page 8 - RAID5 64kb Results Page 9 - RAID5 1024kb Results Page 10 - Conclusion |
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