this is an unboxing that I've been excited to do for a while this is an LSI
Mega raid SAS 926 8i RAID controller
card so this is exciting because it is a 6 gbit per second 8port SAS and SATA
RAID card so what that means is you've actually got full support for either SAS
or SATA drives and either 3 GB per
second or 6 gbit per second so it's one of the most flexible raid cards out
there today now the difference between SAS and SATA I've actually been asked
this before SAS are basically Enterprise level drives and SATA are consumer level
drives you can run a SATA drive on a SAS
interface card but you cannot run a SAS drive on a SATA interface like what you
would find built into a motherboard so there that is the difference here we're
going to find the product specifications in brief so I'm going to go ahead and
scan these for you so you can read them if you really want it supports all the
usual raid levels and all the usual monitor ing
Etc things that you might need we've got support for all the latest operating
systems and you can always of course haha how often do I say this download
the latest drivers from the manufacturer website thank you LSI for mentioning
that you've got uh there's calling out that they are the most trusted raid for
critical data okay they've also got Advanced raid management software and
they're just talking a little bit about that on the box but what I am most
interested in about this particular product is coming up
shortly that was a teaser that's uh
something that I use from time to time to get people to keep watching the video
even when it's a product that probably doesn't have a whole lot of implications
for the average consumer maybe you'll learn a little bit
of something about raid during this video probably not I do have some more
raid themed videos upcoming everyone's been bothering me about that and they
are coming trust me me it's just been uh it's been a little bit hectic and
there's there's a lot that I want to do with those particular videos so the
first thing we find inside is what appears to be a quick installation guide
check that out unpack step one unpack the RAID controller nice okay step two
prepare the computer by turning it off unplugging the power step three review
the jumpers and connectors and how much further does this go wow quite a few
steps so this is quite detailed it includes some um picture diagrams it
includes a whole bunch of steps and hey look at that it talks about raid so if
you want to know what raid is you could freeze the video right now and read that
uh otherwise you can stay tuned for when I'll be doing a video shortly all right
they've got a technical support number on the back and there's some more raid levels in case you were wondering about
that there we go okay next we have replacing the full profile bracket with
low profile brackets how to do it okay
next we have a uh reduction of hazardous
substances uh report say saying that this one is okay so it is Ros compliant
we've got the card itself we'll have a look at that in a moment and then
underneath it looks like we have a cable kit so not all raid controllers come
with cable kits you got to check the part number to see if it's a bare card
or one that comes with cables it doesn't actually matter cuz you can buy cables
usually for about the same price as it would cost to buy a drive with a cable
kit so it's it's up to you which route you
want to go okay so in terms of access accessories we have the low profile
adapter as you can see it comes with the full height
adapter so that's if you're installing it in a one U chassis or anything else
that would require a low profile adapter we've got a couple of adapters I sff 887
I believe is what this connector is called although feel free to correct me
if I'm wrong and then that goes to four
discreete uh SATA SL SAS cables on the
other side so we have two of those because this is an8 p card next we have
a driver utilities and documentation DVD so you might not want to throw this
particular DVD away because it does have some documentation on it um probably how
to use their software and a bunch of stuff along those lines next we have the
card
itself here we have it so these
interfaces are actually in a rather peculiar place on this card so they plug
in right here one two and then out of there you're going to be able to plug
into eight drives directly or you can
actually use uh Splitters in order to plug this particular card into up to
shoot I don't know if it says that on the box but up to 32 SAS or SATA devices there
you go so you can split each so we've got 8 * 32 so you can split each one of
these connectors four ways if you're using magnetic drives that probably
makes a lot of sense but if you're going to be doing what I'm going to be doing
with this card it probably doesn't make much sense because we're going to be
trying to find the absolute limit in thorough put for this card with drum
roll8 SSD drive so the Onyx series SSD
drive that I unboxed recently I have eight of these and I'm going to be
hooking them all up to this particular RAID controller to see what kind of
numbers we can pull through it I also have a battery backup unit so battery
backups actually here this is going to be a little lesson on raid battery
backups are extremely important because the RAID controller actually uses
onboard memory in this case 512 Megs of onboard memory so you can see those
modules are here and there are none on the back to to as a cache so when with a
normal Drive cache any data that's being
held in the cache if the system is powered off or um basically if if the
system loses power for any reason is potentially lost if it's waiting to be
written to the drives and because these dedicated raid controllers have such
enormous caches compared to a typical hard drive where you might see a 32 to
64 Meg cache uh being uh pretty much on
the high end of what you'd see well it's
it's a lot more dangerous to have so
much more data just sitting in a cache waiting to be written when the system's
powered off so what a battery backup does is it actually provides power to
the caches in the event that the system loses power and what that does is it
allows the data to stay there until it can be written to the drives when the
system is powered back on this is especially important for anything that
is Mission critical which is typically where you'd be looking at using
something like a uh high-end raid card
like this well thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the
LSI Mega raid SAS 9268 I and hopefully I
will have some very cool videos for you shortly showing off the SSD capabilities
of this particular card