LSI 9260-8i SATA3 SAS 6Gb/s PCIe 2.0 RAID Card Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,347 words · ~6 min read
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this is an unboxing that I've been excited to do for a while this is an LSI
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Mega raid SAS 926 8i RAID controller
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card so this is exciting because it is a 6 gbit per second 8port SAS and SATA
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RAID card so what that means is you've actually got full support for either SAS
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or SATA drives and either 3 GB per
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second or 6 gbit per second so it's one of the most flexible raid cards out
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there today now the difference between SAS and SATA I've actually been asked
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this before SAS are basically Enterprise level drives and SATA are consumer level
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drives you can run a SATA drive on a SAS
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interface card but you cannot run a SAS drive on a SATA interface like what you
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would find built into a motherboard so there that is the difference here we're
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going to find the product specifications in brief so I'm going to go ahead and
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scan these for you so you can read them if you really want it supports all the
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usual raid levels and all the usual monitor ing
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Etc things that you might need we've got support for all the latest operating
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systems and you can always of course haha how often do I say this download
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the latest drivers from the manufacturer website thank you LSI for mentioning
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that you've got uh there's calling out that they are the most trusted raid for
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critical data okay they've also got Advanced raid management software and
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they're just talking a little bit about that on the box but what I am most
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interested in about this particular product is coming up
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shortly that was a teaser that's uh
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something that I use from time to time to get people to keep watching the video
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even when it's a product that probably doesn't have a whole lot of implications
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for the average consumer maybe you'll learn a little bit
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of something about raid during this video probably not I do have some more
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raid themed videos upcoming everyone's been bothering me about that and they
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are coming trust me me it's just been uh it's been a little bit hectic and
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there's there's a lot that I want to do with those particular videos so the
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first thing we find inside is what appears to be a quick installation guide
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check that out unpack step one unpack the RAID controller nice okay step two
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prepare the computer by turning it off unplugging the power step three review
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the jumpers and connectors and how much further does this go wow quite a few
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steps so this is quite detailed it includes some um picture diagrams it
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includes a whole bunch of steps and hey look at that it talks about raid so if
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you want to know what raid is you could freeze the video right now and read that
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uh otherwise you can stay tuned for when I'll be doing a video shortly all right
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they've got a technical support number on the back and there's some more raid levels in case you were wondering about
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that there we go okay next we have replacing the full profile bracket with
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low profile brackets how to do it okay
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next we have a uh reduction of hazardous
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substances uh report say saying that this one is okay so it is Ros compliant
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we've got the card itself we'll have a look at that in a moment and then
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underneath it looks like we have a cable kit so not all raid controllers come
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with cable kits you got to check the part number to see if it's a bare card
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or one that comes with cables it doesn't actually matter cuz you can buy cables
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usually for about the same price as it would cost to buy a drive with a cable
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kit so it's it's up to you which route you
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want to go okay so in terms of access accessories we have the low profile
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adapter as you can see it comes with the full height
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adapter so that's if you're installing it in a one U chassis or anything else
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that would require a low profile adapter we've got a couple of adapters I sff 887
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I believe is what this connector is called although feel free to correct me
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if I'm wrong and then that goes to four
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discreete uh SATA SL SAS cables on the
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other side so we have two of those because this is an8 p card next we have
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a driver utilities and documentation DVD so you might not want to throw this
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particular DVD away because it does have some documentation on it um probably how
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to use their software and a bunch of stuff along those lines next we have the
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card
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itself here we have it so these
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interfaces are actually in a rather peculiar place on this card so they plug
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in right here one two and then out of there you're going to be able to plug
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into eight drives directly or you can
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actually use uh Splitters in order to plug this particular card into up to
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shoot I don't know if it says that on the box but up to 32 SAS or SATA devices there
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you go so you can split each so we've got 8 * 32 so you can split each one of
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these connectors four ways if you're using magnetic drives that probably
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makes a lot of sense but if you're going to be doing what I'm going to be doing
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with this card it probably doesn't make much sense because we're going to be
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trying to find the absolute limit in thorough put for this card with drum
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roll8 SSD drive so the Onyx series SSD
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drive that I unboxed recently I have eight of these and I'm going to be
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hooking them all up to this particular RAID controller to see what kind of
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numbers we can pull through it I also have a battery backup unit so battery
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backups actually here this is going to be a little lesson on raid battery
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backups are extremely important because the RAID controller actually uses
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onboard memory in this case 512 Megs of onboard memory so you can see those
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modules are here and there are none on the back to to as a cache so when with a
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normal Drive cache any data that's being
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held in the cache if the system is powered off or um basically if if the
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system loses power for any reason is potentially lost if it's waiting to be
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written to the drives and because these dedicated raid controllers have such
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enormous caches compared to a typical hard drive where you might see a 32 to
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64 Meg cache uh being uh pretty much on
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the high end of what you'd see well it's
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it's a lot more dangerous to have so
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much more data just sitting in a cache waiting to be written when the system's
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powered off so what a battery backup does is it actually provides power to
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the caches in the event that the system loses power and what that does is it
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allows the data to stay there until it can be written to the drives when the
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system is powered back on this is especially important for anything that
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is Mission critical which is typically where you'd be looking at using
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something like a uh high-end raid card
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like this well thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the
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LSI Mega raid SAS 9268 I and hopefully I
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will have some very cool videos for you shortly showing off the SSD capabilities
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of this particular card