LSI RAID0 Confusion....

[Old Hippie]

I have installed 2 Crucial 256GB C300 drives on an LSI 9240-4i SATA6 Gb/s expansion card and the results are rather disappointing.

Here's the card with a single drive....

And this is the card with two drives in RAID0....


I'm a novice with this card but as you can see the 4K and 4K-64Thrd have been crippled.

The card would only let me do a 64k stripe and I wanted to do 128k but I doubt that's the problem.



Just for shits and giggles I installed the OS to the Intel SATA3Gb/s on my Asus P6T MB....



I'm pretty much totally lost. I'm not even sure if I set this card up correctly but I finally did get an Acronis image installed.

When I enter this MegaRaid storage manager I hafta log in? Is that normal?

I think I need to enable some kinda write caching but w7's device manager won't do it and I can't get the card to do it either. This LSI Advanced Options stuff doesn't seem to apply to my card.

I have all kinda processor errors in the device manager for my i7 CPU. What's that all about?



Looks like I need this CacheCade caching but I can't?

Lotsa questions and any help would be appreciated.

 

[novasatori]

to enable write cache for LSI, I believe you need the battery backup unit, as per the ssd performance, can't help there... no experience with SSDs and LSI

 

[Old Hippie]

to enable write cache for LSI, I believe you need the battery backup unit, as per the ssd performance, can't help there... no experience with SSDs and LSI

Unfortunately there's no BU battery option avaliable for this card.

 

[Emulex]

use controllers with "cut-through i/o" mode only.. old ones - not good - how does it work with software raid-0?

 

[Old Hippie]

use controllers with "cut-through i/o" mode only.. old ones - not good - how does it work with software raid-0?

If the 9240 model is considered old....I got it.

I only had one option for for somekinda I/O mode and it warned me that that was the slower mode but I had no choice to do something else.

What's it's looking like to me is that even this 240.00 expansion card won't qualify for a decent RAID0 SATA6Gb/s card?

Pretty disappointing coming from LSI.

Edit.... how does it work with software raid-0?

I'm not sure what you're meaning by that but I've posted a shot from an ICH10 install.

 

[Emulex]

FBWC definitely helps. if its any consolation thats faster than 4 savvio 10K 146gb 2.5" sas drives in raid-10 - just not as reliable.

 

[adamantinepiggy]

I think your raid is setup incorrectly or somethibng is wrong at least. For the LSI RAID0 you said you are using 2 256GB C300's. Your 2nd pic of the ASSSD benchmark screen says that it's only 238ish GB in size. If it was setup as RAID0 it should be double, unless you purposely only used 1/2 of each drive. The software RAID 0 pic shows 476Gb as 2 x 238GB should normally be in RAID0.

Just happened to see the size discrepency..

 

[Old Hippie]

I think your raid is setup incorrectly or somethibng is wrong at least. For the LSI RAID0 you said you are using 2 256GB C300's. Your 2nd pic of the ASSSD benchmark screen says that it's only 238ish GB in size. If it was setup as RAID0 it should be double, unless you purposely only used 1/2 of each drive. The software RAID 0 pic shows 476Gb as 2 x 238GB should normally be in RAID0.

Just happened to see the size discrepency..

I see what you mean.

Why is that?

Do I not have the card set-up correctly?

 

[Emulex]

raid-1

 

[Old Hippie]

raid-1

What?

The LSI MegaRaid Storage Manager said I had a RAID0 set-up.

 

[Emulex]

well you have improved speed of raid-10(0+1) but the performance hit of raid-1

though stripe size selection may play a huge difference in your benchmark queen aspects. you do have to consider raid stripe size along with the application to get top speed

 

[Old Hippie]

though stripe size selection may play a huge difference in your benchmark queen aspects. you do have to consider raid stripe size along with the application to get top speed

The card's BIOS wouldn't let me make the stripe size any larger than 64kB which is smaller than the 128kB I wanted but not enough to make much difference.

For all I know AS-SSD is looking at the LSI RAID0 as a single drive and there's nothing wrong except it won't let me access all the advanced software options in the BIOS.

The "key" to unlock these features is @ 150.00 but I don't think my card even has that option.

I was kinda hoping that someone with this 9240-4i card or a 9260-4i card might pop in with some personal experiences.

So far it's looking like LSI is selling a $250.00 SATA6Gb/s card that works great with one drive but can't equal the performance of an integrated ICH10 chipset when using RAID0.

 

[Old Hippie]

well you have improved speed of raid-10(0+1) but the performance hit of raid-1

I'm looking at the 4K and 4K-64Thrd speeds.

I've enable write caching on the drives and improved those speeds....