[HAWT!] LSI MegaRAID SATA300-8XLP for $290!

That is smoking!

The LSI00042-F is only $1 more. Anyohne know what the difference is ?
 
FromTheLou said:
The LSI00042-F should support both 3.3 & 5v while the OP's only supports 3.3v
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You are nearly 100% correct, sir! The 00042-F is not only 3.3V and 5V but also backwards compatible with PCI64/66 as a result!

And the 00042-F was $20 more when I last looked - tip of the hat to NewEgg for bringing the two together!

HOT DAMN!
We need to upgrade this to "Smoking? Hawt? Try LAVA OW OW OW."
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118055
Big Brother 00051 - the PCI-Express 8 drive SAS LP - only $350!
Newegg has the 4 port external connector version at $600 still. That one will NOT last long.
 
AreEss said:
You are nearly 100% correct, sir! The 00042-F is not only 3.3V and 5V but also backwards compatible with PCI64/66 as a result!

And the 00042-F was $20 more when I last looked - tip of the hat to NewEgg for bringing the two together!

HOT DAMN!
We need to upgrade this to "Smoking? Hawt? Try LAVA OW OW OW."
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118055
Big Brother 00051 - the PCI-Express 8 drive SAS LP - only $350!
Newegg has the 4 port external connector version at $600 still. That one will NOT last long.
Click to expand...
That is insanely hot. $300 off?! :eek:
Robstar said:
Per port, it's cheaper than the 8 porter, hence: Hotter :)
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Yes, but if you want Raid 5, the one you posted won't help :p
 
digitalfreak said:
http://www.lsi.com/documentation/storage/megaraid/sas/mr_sas_8308elp_ss.pdf

It's an LSI deal, so you should be able to find this anywhere that sells the cards. Might even be cheaper still. BTW, the SAS controller actually supports up to 16 drives if you use port multipliers/extenders.

Tempting, but I really don't feel like nuking my current array on the RAIDCORE and rebuilding it on this one. :)
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It's a deal with LSI and Newegg. Almost all my other vendors are saying "nope, we won't sell it at that price, or discount it." Those prices also aren't reflected on buyLSI. Only other shop I've found doing the 8038 deal is 8aNet (Acme Micro) - wonderful vendor - they have it at $330.

I'm more than a bit grumpy right now though. As feared, the PCIe beast doesn't work with the OSes I need it to run. No booting off the controller, it becomes worthless. (Onboard RAID, ha ha, no. The OS disks get hammered!) So I'm stuck with PCI-X.. wish they'd do a deal like this on the 320-2X or 320-2E.
 
Hey, AreEss is back! Good to see you - I was worried we'd lost a grumpy perfectionist ;)
AreEss said:
I'm more than a bit grumpy right now though. As feared, the PCIe beast doesn't work with the OSes I need it to run. No booting off the controller, it becomes worthless. (Onboard RAID, ha ha, no. The OS disks get hammered!) So I'm stuck with PCI-X.. wish they'd do a deal like this on the 320-2X or 320-2E.
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Which OSes? BSDs, I guess, or Solaris?

Thanks for the link, by the way - I might just jump on this. I'm looking into doing some scientific testing of disk performance, and a solid controller would be a good place to start.
 
unhappy_mage said:
Hey, AreEss is back! Good to see you - I was worried we'd lost a grumpy perfectionist ;)
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Perfectionist, Guru Of Enterprise Hardware, All Knowing Master Of Arrays, and Humble Bastard. :D

Which OSes? BSDs, I guess, or Solaris?
Click to expand...

PCIe under FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD isn't even a joke.. not that PCI-X works out of the box. (I really should share my patchset at some point, fixes how it always locks to PCI-X/66MHz.)

Thanks for the link, by the way - I might just jump on this. I'm looking into doing some scientific testing of disk performance, and a solid controller would be a good place to start.
Click to expand...

LSI's pretty much the best you can get for stability, hands down. Sadly, most OSes have completely worthless drivers (LINUX) or somewhat spotty drivers (Solaris x86/64 Feb07, FreeBSD.)
 
AreEss said:
PCIe under FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD isn't even a joke.. not that PCI-X works out of the box. (I really should share my patchset at some point, fixes how it always locks to PCI-X/66MHz.)
Click to expand...
Ah, makes sense. With all the enthusiasts watching Linux it gets all the cool drivers first :p
AreEss said:
LSI's pretty much the best you can get for stability, hands down. Sadly, most OSes have completely worthless drivers (LINUX) or somewhat spotty drivers (Solaris x86/64 Feb07, FreeBSD.)
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So... do *any* OSes have good drivers for it? Windows? Other *BSDs? I'm looking for a driver/OS/chipset combination that's unarguably good.

PS: If you use Firefox, you might be interested in my split quote bookmarklet. Makes multi-quoting easier and maintains proper attribution.
 
unhappy_mage said:
Ah, makes sense. With all the enthusiasts watching Linux it gets all the cool drivers first :p
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Yeah. Then they break them horribly. LSI did a really good driver for Linux. Then the idiots completely broke it, made the cache unusable, and so on. Last I heard LSI basically told 'em to get bent because of the breakage they caused.

So... do *any* OSes have good drivers for it? Windows? Other *BSDs? I'm looking for a driver/OS/chipset combination that's unarguably good.
Click to expand...

FreeBSD with my hacks absolutely screams with the Ultra320-2X, ungodly fast. Solaris x86/64 is good with the MPT-Fusion PCI-X cards and most MegaRAIDs, but forget the PCIe's. Typical Sun, selling things that aren't working yet - the ones that did get picked up behaved very badly.

PS: If you use Firefox, you might be interested in my split quote bookmarklet. Makes multi-quoting easier and maintains proper attribution.
Click to expand...

Bah. I have too many plugins already. Besides, my method works just fine. ;)
 
AreEss said:
Yeah. Then they break them horribly. LSI did a really good driver for Linux. Then the idiots completely broke it, made the cache unusable, and so on. Last I heard LSI basically told 'em to get bent because of the breakage they caused.
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Hello 2.6 kernel :( I yearn for the days when there was a "stable" kernel and an "unstable" kernel and things more or less stayed in their boxes. Emphasis on "more or less".

Might the LSI version be around somewhere? Worth looking into?
AreEss said:
FreeBSD with my hacks absolutely screams with the Ultra320-2X, ungodly fast. Solaris x86/64 is good with the MPT-Fusion PCI-X cards and most MegaRAIDs, but forget the PCIe's. Typical Sun, selling things that aren't working yet - the ones that did get picked up behaved very badly.
Click to expand...
So this card plus Solaris would be a decent choice, then? I'm concentrating on sata for now because of a) budget and b) budget, so the 320-2x is out (plus, I don't have your leet patching skillz). That, and people ask more questions about sata than scsi on this forum, so the more answers I can come up with in that area the more dreams I get to shatter :D

Is 32-bit Solaris worthy of consideration, or should I look a new machine for these tests? All I have around is 32-bit boxes. I'm not terribly concerned with performance in terms of STR - running HDTach is so common I don't think I need to do that again - but random I/O is on the agenda. I'll be writing my own benchmarks so that I know what they do.
AreEss said:
Bah. I have too many plugins already. Besides, my method works just fine. ;)
Click to expand...
Eh, your loss. Two-click uninstall (such as it is - right-click, delete), no menu cruft, it Works For Me (tm).
 
unhappy_mage said:
Hello 2.6 kernel :( I yearn for the days when there was a "stable" kernel and an "unstable" kernel and things more or less stayed in their boxes. Emphasis on "more or less".
Might the LSI version be around somewhere? Worth looking into?
Click to expand...

The retards fucked it up back in 2.2, LSI put out a proper one somewhere in 2.4, then they promptly fucked it up again. I mean come on, they can't even get TCP checksum on the EEPro's right - STILL! It has to do with higher level kernel functions that are horrifically broken to put it mildly.

So this card plus Solaris would be a decent choice, then? I'm concentrating on sata for now because of a) budget and b) budget, so the 320-2x is out (plus, I don't have your leet patching skillz). That, and people ask more questions about sata than scsi on this forum, so the more answers I can come up with in that area the more dreams I get to shatter :D
Click to expand...

I'll be happy to save you cash and shatter their idiotic dreams for free. Raptor performing on par with a 15K MAX, HA HA HA! Yeah, also, President Bush resigned, Osama Bin Laden apologized for the WTC, and THG published a factual review.
However.. I haven't done enough testing with the SATA MegaRAIDs and Solaris. I can't recommend it. They're not on the HCL. If it's not on the HCL yet, it's not safe. So, yeah, welcome to the land of you're just boned. *sigh*

Is 32-bit Solaris worthy of consideration, or should I look a new machine for these tests? All I have around is 32-bit boxes. I'm not terribly concerned with performance in terms of STR - running HDTach is so common I don't think I need to do that again - but random I/O is on the agenda. I'll be writing my own benchmarks so that I know what they do.
Click to expand...

I don't screw around with bus. Contention will destroy validity. So unless you've already got some very big boxes laying around, start planning on laying out somewhere around $2-3K for a test platform. At least.
Oh, and remember that HCL? Yeah.. guess what? NEC uPD PCI-X controllers - forget it, invalidates, broken piece of trash. Intel 5000-series chipsets? I don't know any OS that doesn't have issues with them thanks to craptastic drivers or no drivers; they can go a lot faster. nForce? HA HA HA HA. So really you're pretty much limited to AMD8111/8132 (8131 downclocks too easily) or I think it would be 7525 but I'd have to double check, with the ESB2 on a very select set of boards (which specifically excludes everything from Tyan.)

Eh, your loss. Two-click uninstall (such as it is - right-click, delete), no menu cruft, it Works For Me (tm).
Click to expand...

Yeah, but this works for me. ^^^^
:D
 
So how is this card USABLE if it doesn't have drivers for ANYTHING? Sounds like I can't use it on linux at all.
 
So what about the kernel drivers?

lsikernel.jpg


Has anybody had a chance to see if any of those work?
 
Volkum, those are the ones I'm talking about.
They're broken. They have an unacceptable risk of data corruption (>50% @ +=10% load) due to severe brain damage being present in supposed kernel developers. I highly suspect it's the same issue as why you can't get a valid TCP checksum out of Intel EtherExpress cards, but I'm not willing to subject myself to the torture of trying to debug a kernel written by people who insist they don't need a real debugger.

FreeBSD has support for most of them, but performance is subpar without work; about 80MB/sec write, and ~140MB/sec read on RAID1 with U320's. Does it work though? Yeah. It works. It's mostly stable - there are issues with the new MPT-Fusion PCIe's, but not data corruption issues. Just the whole box crashing on occasion issues. (Or drives vanishing on crappy backplanes from Chenbro. But that's the backplane.)
Solaris x86/64, expect support to improve, but it's not all there yet. My recommendation is to wait on that, because the cards don't appear on the HCL. Anything which is not on the HCL, Sun doesn't consider supported. That doesn't mean it doesn't detect necessarily, or work, but I don't recommend taking chances.
Windows 2K and 2K3 have excellent drivers. XP, not so much so, but XP isn't supposed to go on servers and desktops aren't traditionally supposed to have high end RAID cards.
 
AreEss said:
Volkum, those are the ones I'm talking about.
They're broken. They have an unacceptable risk of data corruption (>50% @ +=10% load) due to severe brain damage being present in supposed kernel developers. I highly suspect it's the same issue as why you can't get a valid TCP checksum out of Intel EtherExpress cards, but I'm not willing to subject myself to the torture of trying to debug a kernel written by people who insist they don't need a real debugger.

FreeBSD has support for most of them, but performance is subpar without work; about 80MB/sec write, and ~140MB/sec read on RAID1 with U320's. Does it work though? Yeah. It works. It's mostly stable - there are issues with the new MPT-Fusion PCIe's, but not data corruption issues. Just the whole box crashing on occasion issues. (Or drives vanishing on crappy backplanes from Chenbro. But that's the backplane.)
Solaris x86/64, expect support to improve, but it's not all there yet. My recommendation is to wait on that, because the cards don't appear on the HCL. Anything which is not on the HCL, Sun doesn't consider supported. That doesn't mean it doesn't detect necessarily, or work, but I don't recommend taking chances.
Windows 2K and 2K3 have excellent drivers. XP, not so much so, but XP isn't supposed to go on servers and desktops aren't traditionally supposed to have high end RAID cards.
Click to expand...

I planned to use these under Linux. I am having major problems with a promise card (non-raid) that I originally bought for windows a couple years ago that now sucks :)

What about using these as non-raid adapters in jbod mode and using raid in linux? I plan to do raid 10 or 50 with probably 12-24, 400/500/750 disks.
 
Robstar said:
I planned to use these under Linux. I am having major problems with a promise card (non-raid) that I originally bought for windows a couple years ago that now sucks :)

What about using these as non-raid adapters in jbod mode and using raid in linux? I plan to do raid 10 or 50 with probably 12-24, 400/500/750 disks.
Click to expand...

Keep dreaming. The issue is how they don't do DMA properly, and talk to the card itself. Any use of the card is just inviting data corruption on Linux. You may as well run a magnet over it in JBOD with software RAID; it'd be less painful long term. I have the misfortune of speaking from experience.
 
I've started a new thread in Disk Storage to discuss my question further, here, so I don't disrupt further discussion about the LSI card. Anyone's welcome to give input.
 
I've never bought an open box item from New Egg before, but how can I pass up a modern hardware SATA II RAID card for $242.99!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118046R

The regular price at Newegg is $470!!

--------------------------------
Few questions

1) Any experience with open box items at Newegg? Can I still send it in to LSI for repair under warranty if it doesn't work right?

2) I'm in no hurry to use it at this very moment, mainly because I don't have a PCI-X server board (yet), but I'd like to test it. Will it work in any 32bit/33Mhz PCI slot and at least boot up?

-Robert
 
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