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Welcome to our follow up of the LSI 9265-8i MegaRAID Card, an eight-port PCI Express SATA+SAS RAID Controller that is configured for 6Gb/s devices.
Our first LSI review concentrated on RAID 0 speed and performance and the response prompted our further testing of the LSI in a RAID 5 environment. Take a look as we explore the in-depth the performance of the 9265 as it tackles an array of 8 solid state drives.
RAID 0 is the ‘big dog’ when it comes to flat out performance. In previous generation RAID cards, the maximum sequential throughput and random I/O would make it impossible to match the speed of RAID 0 with a RAID 5 setup. The stage is changing, however, as the dual core ROC LSI2208 of the the 9265 raises RAID 5 performance to new levels.
First a quick refresher on the controller itself:
INTRODUCTION
- Ability to achieve 465,000 IOPS with a single controller
- 4x IOPS performance advantage over the closest competitor
- 3x greater IOPS than LSIs 1st generation 6Gb/s controllers
- 10x greater IOPS than todays 3Gb/s controllers
- 67% improvement in RAID 5 & 6 sequential writes (up to 2600 MB/s)
These are just a few of the selling points of the 9265 MegaRAID card whose controller boasts a new ROC, the LSISAS2208 Dual- core 6Gb/s ROC- x2 800MHz PowerPC Processor. This engine is key to its performance as it leverages the increased throughput of the 8x PCI Express 2.0 host interface for higher throughput and ease of connection. Even this bus is proving to be squeezed here by the sheer power of this card.
Another big step forward is the expansion into DDR3 cache running at 1333MHz, this being the first available controller to use this speed of cache, with previous generations using DDR2 800 MHz. This will enable faster write performance on the controller in certain scenarios. The raid card provides a plethora of connectivity for all of your storage needs, fully supporting all speeds of SAS and SATA, all the way up to 6Gb/s!
SPECIFICATIONS
Features
- Eight internal SATA+SAS ports
- Two mini-SAS SFF-8087 x4 connectors
- 6Gb/s throughput per port LSISAS2208
- Dual Core ROC
– 800MHz PowerPC® MD2 - Low profile (6.6? X 2.536?)
- x8 PCI Express 2.0 host interface
- 1GB DDRIII cache (1333MHz)
- Optional battery backup unit (LSIiBBU09 remote mount)
- Connect up to 128 SATA and/or SAS devices
- RAID levels 0, 1, 5 and 6
- RAID spans 10, 50 and 60
- Auto-resume on rebuild
- Auto-resume on reconstruction
- Online Capacity Expansion (OCE)
- Online RAID Level Migration (RLM)
- SSD support with SSD Guard
- Global and dedicated hot spare with revertible hot spare support
– Automatic rebuild
– Enclosure affinity
– Emergency SATA hot spare for SAS arrays - Single controller multipathing (failover) I/O load balancing
- Comprehensive RAID management suite
Benefits
- Second generation 6Gb/s SATA+SAS with unprecedented levels of performance
- Ideal for internal storage environments using up to 128 SAS, SATA and solid state drives (SSDs)
- Unsurpassed IOPs performance and advanced software options help users realize full benefits of SSD deployments
- Meets high I/O transaction demands of database and datacenter applications
- Provides the sustained data transfer rates and high sequential bandwidth to meet processing requirements of digital media, video and imaging environments
LINKED INDEX
Introduction ~ Test Bench & Protocol ~ Card Settings
RAID 5 Explained ~ Initial Tests ~ AS SSD
Any chance of testing RAID6? This would put more load on the controller’s CPU which would be a better test of the controller’s limits. A RAID6 test would also be of real world use to a lot of readers as not many people are going to be creating RAID5 arrays with 8 (or more using SAS expanders) drives.