April 28, 2011   Paul Alcorn   2 Comments

LSI 9265-8i 6Gbps MegaRAID Card RAID 5 Tested! – Final Thoughts

PCMARK VANTAGE HDD SUITE

In PCMark Vantage the data simply cannot be manipulated, and a result is provided based on the transfer speeds observed in eight simulated user activities. This is also a widely accepted opinion held by many reviewers and storage enthusiasts.

Through Vantage, the user gains large benefits in the write-back feature of the  RAID card as the card holds the writes in the cache until the devices are not busy. This benchmark uses both mixed read/write tests and is a good test for overall performance.

There are eight tests in all and the tests performed record the speed of data movement in MB/s to which they are then given a numerical score after all of the tests are complete.  The simulations are as follows:

  • Windows Defender In Use
  • Streaming Data from storage in games such as Alan Wake which allows for massive worlds and riveting non-stop action
  • Importing digital photos into Windows Photo Gallery
  • Starting the Vista Operating System
  • Home Video editing with Movie Maker which can be very time consuming
  • Media Center which can handle video recording, time shifting and streaming from Windows media center to an extender such as XBox
  • Cataloging a music library
  • Starting applications

LSI 9265-8i RAID CONTROLLER VANTAGE TEST RESULTS

The RAID 5 results are very encouraging in this subtest resulting in an all time high total point score of 83988 points.

  • Test 1 – Windows Defender – 322.97 MB/s
  • Test 2 – Gaming – 243.01 MB/s
  • Test 3 – Importing pictures to Windows Photo Gallery -  418.05 MB/s
  • Test 4 – Windows Vista Startup – 410.74 MB/s
  • Test 5 – Video editing using Windows Movie Maker  344.15 MB/s
  • Test 6 – Windows Media Center – 1048.26 MB/s
  • Test 7 – Adding music to Windows Media Player -  263.32 MB/s
  • Test 8  – Application loading 429.15 MB/s
FINAL THOUGHTS

Once again, testing the 9265-8i MegaRAID controller was a great experience!  The card truly delivers in all aspects. The LSI2208 ROC truly delivers with the demanding work that using RAID 5 entails. The initialization was very speedy, especially for such a large capacity array, Its latency superb and the random and sequential throughput is just excellent for a RAID 5 array.
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Another thing of note is that the MegaRAID Storage Manager (MSM) is a very intuitive graphical user interface that is easy to use.  It allows you to control almost every aspect of the controller and manage your virtual drives in a user friendly manner.
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As more and more users are concerned about data safety and flexibility in RAID environments it is nice to see the RAID 5 performance scale so well with this storage solution.  The sequential write performance is simply great and the controller does a very good job of utilizing the expanded amount of cache to its advantage.
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As stated previously, the LSI MegaRAID 9265-8i is an absolute winner for enterprise use.  The sheer power of both the IOPS and throughput of the RAID controller are, quite simply, unmatched. The IOPS are 4x that of the nearest competitor, and the card boasts a 67 percent improvement in streaming writes. With the ability of this card to replace several other cards, the savings in both cost and the actual physical numbers of servers is impressive. To add to that, using the massive potential of the SSDs will yet increase savings further in the number of devices, power, and cooling required to use them in enterprise solutions.
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LINKED INDEX

Introduction ~ Test Bench & Protocol ~ Card Settings

RAID 5 Explained ~ Initial Tests ~ AS SSD

HDTune ~ Win 7 & AIDA ~ IOMeter 08

Vantage and Final Thoughts

FOLLOW THE DISCUSSION IN OUR FORUMS

Posted in: Our SSD Reviews, Raid/Enterprise
  • http://www.abscomtech.com.au LostBenji

    Good,quick review. The test rig could be cleaned up a little but thats just trivial and has no bearing on the outcome. As for the LSI card, they are decent performer but still have the appearence of being rough and raw. I would have liked to see the Cache as a DDR III SODIMM to allow users to change or upgrade rather than requiring expensive additions. As for the SSD’s, I feel this review would benefit from using several arrays including the excessively priced C300′s as well as SSD’s in the domestic areas. Also, I understand that the site is for SSD’s but using a mixture of SATA and SAS HDD’s for more comparison. The other area most hide away is the negitive effects of RAIDing SSD’s in respect of TRIM being lost. The only RAID that is supposed to support TRIM in RAID is Intel Matrix with version 9.xx software however, still buggy. It’s nice seing the high speeds but no good if the system is a mess after a month of use.

  • MartinL

    What is really missing here is the “real RAID5 performance figures” which are 4K Random Writes. Reads on a redundant RAID5 do not need to go through the RAID stack as soon as fastpath is installed. Sequential writes do but are basically an equiation of compute power and memory bandwidth. Same if you look on the LSI web page performance figures – all marketing figures that avoid what is really important on a typical Web or OLTP server. Additionally, I would want to see performance figures on a RAID5 in non redundant state and during rebuild as again, in that case the RAID stack matters.