Serveraid M5015 512MB Sas/sata Lp Hba 6GBPS Incl Battery Best Price
- IBM - SERVER OPTIONS 46M0829 SERVERAID M5015 512MB SAS/SATA
Best Review: Serveraid M5015 512MB Sas/sata Lp Hba 6GBPS Incl Battery - This is an LSI 9260-8i less RAID-6. They're available on the big auction site for around $200. LSI is one of the most popular choices for RAID HBAs, both in large corporations and the hobbyist market. The 9260 supports every significant HBA technology save management by a directly-attached network cable. All of the 9260's features are available on this IBM ServeRAID card with an 'advanced feature key' dongle, though the cost rivals the native 9260.I bought the M5014 version of this controller (the same, but with 256 MB of write cache instead of 512 MB) for a file server with an Intel i7 quad-core, a Gigabyte P55A motherboard, Windows 8 x64, and 8 2TB 5400 RPM Hitachi drives. The previous controller was a RAIDCore RC5252. Shortly after purchase, I flashed the card to 9260-8i firmware. This resulted in a modest reduction in boot initialization time and allowed my keyboard to work in the pre-boot Web BIOS interface. I used the card for about a week before returning it for an Adaptec HBA.A few notes:* I couldn't get my USB mouse to work with Web BIOS. Before I flashed the card, my PS2 keyboard wouldn't work either. The GUI isn't totally functional with a keyboard, though there's a second command-line interface available.* Drive insertions have a ten-second delay before the controller detects them.* LSI's Storage Manager is not terribly intuitive relative to RAIDCore. Try breaking and recovering the array before you put data on it.* The software will let you force write cache with RAID-5 and RAID-6 even in absence of a battery. If your system is stable and on a UPS, this could be safe enough and economical. Battery life is 6 months to 5 years depending on temperature and settings.* The card is fast most of the time. Read and write speeds in RAID-5 are capable of saturating a gigabit link with these drives. I did have a strange issue where my write speeds dropped to 15 MB/s during a large transfer. This, while copying over gigabit from an SSD. The array, SSD, and connection were not in use at the time. No background processes on the HBA. Couldn't figure this one out.* It runs hot. It's designed to be used in a chassis with active cooling. With modest airflow, I was seeing temperatures of 50C and above. The card won't warn you with a constant alarm like certain Adaptec controllers, but high numbers will severely reduce the life of the $150 battery.* It dropped one of my drives in the first day of use, a drive that checked out in diagnostics and other metrics. Among consumer drives, Hitachi leads the pack for RAID compatibility. Not encouraging.* LSI has disabled array spindown in recent firmwares. It'll let your hot spare idle, but not the array itself. Power use aside, this will impact the lifespan of your drives.I replaced this card with an Adaptec 5805, also purchased at auction for around $175. These cards run hotter and don't have SAS 6 Gb/s support, but they're also faster and support RAID-6 and drive spindown. A rebranded equivalent ("Sun 375-3536") with half the memory and circa-2011 firmware is available for around $150.
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