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I'm in the Colorado Springs office. I always wish I could answer more questions about our controllers in this forum, but even though I know the chips inside and out, I know very little about the publicly-available utilities that LSI distributes.

That's a lot of ports to cram onto a half-height HBA! Of course, mini-SAS HD is making this possible, finally! Computurd, keep in mind the moderator of this very subforum is an engineer at LSI's RAID Storage Division ;) I tend to let our marketing guys do the talking since I'm never sure...

Well, that's certainly unusual! Is there a chance the bracket was bent or slightly off in size? I wonder if it was pushing it just far enough back or out of the slot that there wasn't a good enough connection for the PCIe link to train correctly...

In Ubuntu, if you issue the command 'lspci' in the terminal, do you see the controller listed among the PCI devices?

Closed it for you. Interesting project you have going on there!

Please no sales/trades outside of the FS/FT forum. Refer to rule 16 - http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=760666

I think in the particular setup you are considering, there would be no performance benefits. You are correct that you could get two paths to each drive, which helps with redundancy should one of the physical connections have a problem. However, the benefits of load balancing would only be...

I'm not sure what expander is on that board, but I do know for sure that a 1068 can easily support well over 100 devices with the proper expanders connected to it. My first guess is that it's a 24- or 36-port PMC expander, with 4 of the ports connected to the 1068 (you can't make an 8-wide...

Not since the early, early SATA drives that were really bridged PATA and used a Marvell chip to bridge. Otherwise, they seem very compatible with every drive we've thrown at them. :eek: Oh, not at all... even though it seems the top management has been slowly replaced by ex-intel people, it's...

In the lab I work in, we use Kapton tape for covering up pins on edge connectors. It works really well and lasts for at least tens of insertions. But I guess it's not likely that you have a roll sitting around your house.

Yeah, it's odd that the 6i is able to, but the 8888ELP can't. They are both based off the same SAS1078 controller and run the same firmware stack. I was personally and extensively involved with the validation of the power save features of the SAS1078 controller and there is no reason that an...

Yep. All MegaRAID cards do have boot support.

They're faster than anything you've ever seen :) But I'm just a tease, apparently, and can't release any of my numbers due to confidentiality reasons, but have been playing with these for about a year now. I think it won't be long until some numbers are actually out there, though.

You can try this also, all the features of wmwifirouter, but free and, in my opinion, easier to set up: HTC CM Wifi Sharing The USB port method will drain your battery much less quickly (and will, in fact, charge it from the USB port). On most newer HTC devices, you just have to plug in the...

Exactly... Last warning for everyone: Keep it on topic. If you don't want to discuss the subject at hand, keep out of it.

The PERC6 controllers are custom boards that are built around the LSI SAS1078 single-chip RAID controller. They are pretty much the equivalent of a MegaRAID SAS 8708ELP. Once you take the weird backplane thing that comes attached to it off, it should fit in a standard PCIe slot (But it...

If I could help you fill out some of the question marks you have by the chipsets: The Dell SAS 5i, SAS 5e, and HP SC44GE are all built around the LSI 1068e SAS controller. The Hewlett-Packard 8 Internal Port SAS Host Bus Adapter with RAID is actually an LSI 1068 SAS controller (a custom...

It's actually 150MB/s. Although the link operates at a physical rate of 1.5 gigabits/s, the encoding scheme that is used (8b/10b) uses 10 bit times to encode 8 bits of actual data, so the raw physical rate must be divided by 10 instead of 8 when figuring the throughput. However, you're...

The SATA specification is intended to be forward and backward compatible on both the drives and the controllers. The speed of the interface should be automatically negotiated. In most cases, the jumper was provided because some older SATA 1.5gb/s controllers weren't properly handling drives...

Yes, more than you could imagine... :) Do you have any specific questions about it?

I read through some of those, and I'm quite skeptical that a PERC controller is causing the drives to fail in any physical manner. Sure, I could accept that they had data corruption or the configuration of the array itself went bad, but there's no way it's actually physically damaging the...

Hmm, something about that article has bothered me since I first read it a while ago -- I'm not sure what methodology they were using, but I would expect any LSI part to pass those tests without any problem. Now, I may be biased based on my experience with LSI parts (and the fact that I am...

We've had many questions regarding why hard drive capacities are always smaller than the amount they are advertised to contain. The difference in capacities is due to two different methods for defining what exactly the prefixes mega, giga, tera mean. In the computer world, these prefixes...

I've used it in hundreds of systems succesfully... Which motherboard are you currently using? I would question that it's a motherboard compatibility problem, though, if you are able to get far enough to install an OS to it. Have you checked to see if it has the latest firmware and BIOS...

The PERC5 and PERC6 boards use completely different logic to interface with PCI-E. The PERC5 boards use an external Intel IOP that has the PCI-E interface, whereas the PERC6 has an LSI SAS1078 chip, which has a native PCI-E interface built in. That being said, the PERC6 has very good...

That's right. The technical name is SGPIO or Serial GPIO.

In a non-SSC configuration, all the EMI (Electro-magnetic interference) is radiated at a single frequency. Spread spectrum reduces EMI by varying the clock slightly to flatten out the frequency spike across a wider range.

Theoretically, there would be a small performance penalty. SATA SSC works by varying the clock rate from the maximum supported speed down a very small amount, and then back up to the max (3.0gb/s). Realistically, the difference in the clock rates between the maximum (with no SSC) and the...

Might be worth noting that it's pins 5 and 6 on the A side of the board (the side that usually doesn't have big components on it). It seems that some systems have problems with the SMBus implementation on the MegaRAID cards.

This thread has gotten a little out of hand. Please keep in mind rule number one: (1) Absolutely NO FLAMING, NAME CALLING OR PERSONAL ATTACKS. Mutual respect and civilized conversation is the required norm.

It seems to depend on your particular motherboard's implementation as to whether it can supply more than 10W to a x1 slot. I'm not sure if that information is in the user's manual or not (I'd guess not...), but maybe the manufacturer can tell you. Also, be careful, PCI and PCI-E are not...

That depends on the particular mother board implementation. There are two possible power limits for a x1 slot, either 10W or 25W. I haven't used the motherboard that the original post mentions, so I don't know what it implements, but I've never had a problem using a x8 storage controller (PERC...

If you're comfortable with your Dremel skills, you can actually notch out the back part of a x1 PCI-E slot and then put any length card you want in there. All PCI-E cards are required by the specification to support x1 operation (which doesn't necessarily mean they all do, but I know for...

Slightly off-topic, but that board is actually only eight ports. The SAS controller has 8 ports on it, and there is a mux on-board that can program the signals to go to either the internal or the external connector (configurable per group of 4), but not to both connectors.

Unfortunately, none of the external SAS cables provide the sideband signals that the SGPIO signals are typically wired to on the internal connectors. What most vendors do in that case is use a SAS expander that can emulate a SES/SEP device and send the enclosure commands in-band to that...

Sent And Sent

If anyone has a spare for your favorite Disk Storage Forum Mod... (I need to, uh, do research for the forum :) ) brian DOT einsweiler AT gmail DOT com I'll pay it forward for any other requests in here. Thanks!

Just curious what SAS controllers you are using. I know that LSI SAS/RAID controllers do full hardware SATA protocol, so there is no performance penalty compared to a standard SATA controller (and in many cases, they are faster than SATA controllers when talking to SATA devices) I hope we...

Well, it depends on your application. Conventional PCI runs at 33MHz and is a 32-bit bus, so you get a maximum theoretical transfer rate of 132MB/s. Also, keep in mind that PCI is a shared bus topology, which means this bandwidth may be shared among multiple devices depending on your...

Oh, very much so. ;) You don't need an interposer to either directly connect a SATA drive to a controller or a SATA drive to an expander. In the case of directly attaching to the controller, well, there's only one thing that link can talk to so the WWID problem goes away. When you...