LSI 9265-4i?

[grogthegreat]

Hi,
I'm just wondering if anyone out there has any idea on when we might see LSI release the 9265-4i card?
Cheers,
-Grog

[groberts101]

dunno.. that would be a very good question for the mfgr themselves. Aside from Computurd or maybe Les.. I would doubt anyone would know much more than what google will tell us.

If I had to guess though?.. I would think it's doubtful they would release a smaller version with hardware that's so expensive to produce and with the thought that 4 drives will never reach it's full potential. Plus, it's doubtful that the price would vary so greatly from the 8 port version that the market would make it worth LSI's time. Would be like buying a pint of milk for 1.29 when you can get the quart for 1.49. At that point.. you're more or less paying for the packaging.

[m.oreilly]

it would make sense to users like us, since you could very well get top sequential performance out of 4x sata6 ssds, but it would be market aimed. when it was sataII/sas3 hdd, the 4 fit a certain bill. but with the advent of sataIII ssds, i bet lsi, as gro berts mentioned, figured it might be counter income intuitive to host a 4 banger, especially since they bought out sandforce...

[Computurd]

there is actually talk of this being released, and was mentioned at AIS2011. While there may be a somewhat limited market, there are always people with expanders who will look to get great deals! With a decent expander these can be wonderful devices! With one port on the ARC-4036 for instance you can have 16 drives once connected to the enclosure with one cable

if i recall correctly it was Q1 this year

[grogthegreat]

I suspect the card will be significantly less than the 9265-8i because the 9260-4i is a lot cheaper than the 9260-8i. The 9265-8i isn't much more than the 9260-8i so I suspect that the 9265-4i won't be that much more than the 9260-4i.

As for the use of the card, Computurd is right, in that people with SAS expander will want this which is a rather large market. They want the speed of the 9265 RoC and its DDR3 cache but don't want to spend a bunch extra on a 8087 port they don't need. I currently have all 24 HDD bays of my Norco 4224 hooked up to my 9260-4i by using a single SAS expander. As long as my raid arrays don't push more than 3GBps, than the single sas 8087 cable I have between the card and the sas expander has plenty of bandwidth.

I've been wanting to get cacheCade2.0 but since it is tied to a controller, I can't buy it for my 9260-4i and then latter on, buy a 9265-4i and move the CacheCade2.0 to the new card. So basically I have to wait for the 9265-4i to come out. I initially heard it was coming Q1 2012 but I hadn't heard anything about the card since late fall so I started to wonder if plans had changed. LSI doesn't tend to leak things like this in advance so it can make it hard to plan ahead.

[m.oreilly]

well, i'll be. neat.

[Computurd]

im telling ya, the ARC-4036 for me is irreplaceable. It makes life so easy..its own PSU and all that...no muss with cables! Here is a old review of it....

actually the who big long review there can be summed up by clicking the picture on the top of the last page...found here...

http://thessdreview.com/raid-enterprise/areca-arc-4036-6gbs-sassata-jbod-enclosure-conclusion/

one of the best, if not the best hardware pic, ive ever been lucky enough to catch! pure computer PRON!!!

[grogthegreat]

Looks like the card is official. LSI is releasing two new cards, the LSI 9266-4i and the 9266-8i. The LSI 9266-4i seems to be the 9265-4i that I was waiting for while the 9266-8i seems to be exactly the same as the 9265-8i except that it supports CacheCade2.0 and it costs more. If I had bought a 9265-8i with the intention of buying CacheCade2.0 when it came out, I'd be very upset right now.
Looks like the cards should be available in April for $540 and $780 for the -4i and -8i respectively.
Source: LSI MegaRAID 9266 Released with CacheCade Pro 2.0 Support | StorageReview.com - Storage Reviews

[renosablast]

It appears that the CacheCade2.0 eliminated the need for the separately-sold battery backup solution. Will have to look and see how the price of the two separate components compares to the new card with CacheCade 2.0 installed.

Oops, It is the CacheVault technology that replaces the BBU; not the CacheCade.

[grogthegreat]

According to the specs in the source I linked to above, the ability to get rid of the BBU is piece of software sold at extra cost just like fastpath and CacheCade. The increased cost of the 9266-8i over the 9265-8i is, as far as I can tell, simply due to different firmware that allows you to spend more money on the CacheCade2.0 software.