LSI SAS 9211-4i Review

[CMetaphor]

Here we go, finally got some numbers from mine:


Dell Perc 6/i - Adaptive Read Back and Write Through both Enabled.

[CMetaphor]

Heres the Crystalmark @ 1.8Tb, i have to redo the ATTO as well to reflect the 1.8Tb partition size:

[grinder]

those ATTO numbers look a bit low compared to my Adaptec 1405

win7 64 / 4x WD 640 black / RAID 10

[CMetaphor]

Dam grinder, do tell how you got those numbers?... I really was hoping to get better performance out of my Dell perc 6i..
What settings? Cluster size? OS drive or nay? Etc....

[grinder]

i know!!! it's higher than my Intel 256MB 8 port PCIe raid controller!!!

MAJOR CORRECTION

I set this up a long time ago.. thought it was RAID 10 but it's RAID 0... sorry guys; you can kick me in the rear for not double checking my settings.

Anyways, 64K cluster, win7 ultimate 64, it IS my OS drive.

[3.0charlie]

Interesting card, price / performance-wise. I was actually expecting less than what you have tested jd.

To put your numbers in perspective, my setup: 3ware 9650LE-8, 4 Sammy F1s + 4 Seagates 7200.12s in Raid 50. Data drive, 5.45Tb total.



@grinder:

[JD]

You guys make mine look pretty damn slow

But whatever, it's perfectly fine for my needs. Most I can get out of it is Gigabit speeds (so roughly 100MB/s) as it's accessed mainly over the network. Mostly reading too, not much writing. Basically contains all my media, which compared to some people is quite a small collection. Only a mere 515GB

Total storage on my server is about 2.8TB (mix of RAID1 and RAID10 arrays), and 1.5TB (RAID5) on my desktop. Less than most people's single arrays...

[3.0charlie]

Hence my comment. Compare the price I paid for my setup, vs. yours.

9650SE-8 Card: ~500$
8 1Tb HDDs: ~700$.

For someone who needs a nice card, with some data protection the LSI looks like a very good deal.

[CMetaphor]

I still don't "like" how the ATTO graphs look for my Perc 6i.... I mean, for all the other ones posted here -the LSI, 3Ware and even that adaptec (despite is Raid 0-ness, lol grinder)- all have steadily increasing read/write #s as the data size moves up. But on my ATTO graph I get some drop offs for writing at 128k, 4Mb and 8Mb. I guess I don't understand enough about how the raid cards works (and sorry that i keep straying further and further off topic jdrom17) but i really want to understand the inconsistencies here. Any help guys?

[JD]

I know, I'm bumping up my old thread

But both my Seagate 7200.12 1TB drives have failed (SMART fail actually) so they're off to RMA. Haven't decided if I'll keep the 7200.12s around for backup or sell them off.

However, my RAID10 is now purely Samsung F3 drives so the benchmarks are a bit different. However there's also data on the array now which probably skews results too.

Also the driver/firmware on the card are newer now too. Either way though, seems performance is up now, especially the writes.