LSI 9265-8i

[Computurd]

well fellas she arrived this morning...working through some wiring 'issues' right now...man 24 SSD altogether is proving a bit rough to get power to
that is a good problem to have though!

the card in the background is the 9260, there for comparison.

Note the dual PCB on the 9265-8i..there is a daughtercard that is connected via a bus...apparently to keep the footprint down for the smaller servers.
man compared to the 1880 it is VERY small...i will post pics of that soon and some other things..but heres a few to kick it off....
and speaking of HOT this things HS is on fire...i will put a digital temp probe on it shortly after working thorugh some issues and give some data on that...
here is a link to our 'teaser' article, and we will be doing the full review very soon!
http://thessdreview.com/latest-buzz/lsi-new-megaraid-9265-8i-card-delivers-2-7gbs-read-3-2gbs-write-with-465-000-iops/

[Anvil]

Thanks CT

Really, a lot hotter than the 9260 hmmmm

I'm using enclosures for my SSDs, 1 power for each enclosure saves a lot of cables.

chieftec.PNG

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[Halk]

Nice tentacle shot!

[Computurd]

going to be a bit of a pause in testing here i just had a pretty big leak on my rig JESUS water on the mobo!!
of all the luck jesus lord thank god nothing *appears* to have fried....

[Computurd]

[Anvil]

Not good at all!

Hoping it turns out OK

[Halk]

Water, surprisingly enough doesn't instakill motherboards.

I've had both a graphics card and a motherboard drenched before and I've been surprised when they lived through it. However I do remember that just-been-punched-in-the-guts feeling when I saw it. Mine wasn't near the CPU though!

[mattkosem]

chieftec.PNG

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Wish they had something like that for 1.8" drives...

--Matt

[Computurd]

well the rig is back up, and running fine. thank you jesus!

so i am meesin round with this here 9265-8i with 8 C300 256 GB on there to start with. at first its seeming like it doesnt want to do much, man the scores are terrible for like an hour and im thinking :wtf?:
this is a prototype, so it has only 512 mb of ram, and im thinking well maybe thats it.....then...



IT TAKES OFF!!!





these are preliminary results btw so i am not sure of what it can do in its totality. we shall see soon!

[Computurd]

MBreslin btw yhpm!

[felix_w]

512MB including the ones on the second PCB ?

[Anvil]

Do you get to try CC or FP ?

I've ordered CC, strange btw that it's got 512MB, my card hasn't cleared customs yet but it sounded like it was about to...

[Computurd]

card bios and the MSM both say 512 mb. this is a sample that was rushed to us so that we could get some initial numbers out....they gave us 4-day "exclusive" testing period....

comparing my card to the images on lsi.com the daughterboard seems to be missing two chips...my guess is thats my other 512mb a full version of the card will be coming as soon as they receive one they dont even have one yet here...and this is straight from LSI marketing department.

all keys are activated. strange but there is a raid 5 and raid 6 key on this as well...not sure if that will be standard issue though.

maybe you guys are getting stock over there quicker? dunno but this thing is FAST

[Anvil]

Software keys?

[Computurd]

yup...i will be testing cachecade soon, but not yet, other stuff to do first

not sure if they will charge for raid 5 or 6 or not. gonna compile some questions to send their way...

[robbicfc]

What are your initial feelings from a price / performance point of view? i.e compared the crazy Areca 1880. I'm thinking the 9265 + Cachecade will really do a 4RO Sandforce 2*** justice compared to a little 9240 that I have at the moment

[Computurd]

well... that reamins to be seen...im sure that will be in the conclusions on the review

[robbicfc]

, waiting ever so impatiently.

[Halk]

Are the 4K writes in that AS-SSD benchmarks poor? I don't know what to expect from those drives so I am not sure.

[alfaunits]

Why is it capped at 1GB/s for sequentials?
We need a new expression for jealousy BTW, the word is too weak to express how we feel now

[Halk]

It has an IOP on it, which will have a limit to how much it can process. 1GB/sec may be that limit? I am guessing.

[Anvil]

There are several reasons to the "low" seq read performance, WT, 8KB strip size are the 2 primary factors.

There is no single task where you can utilize the so called "low" througput, benchmarks are one of the rare places you'll spot them, except for in servers.
The IOP is not the limiting factor , its merely a question of tuning for high throuhput or high iops.

[Computurd]

yes the majority of testing will be done with 64k stripe, WT, and DIO. it is the recommended LSI fastpath settings. @ 16k results have been higher than these btw

[Mitchb]

For comparison's sake, can you perhaps select a few different configurations and run both the 9265 and 9260? This would give an idea of what to expect with an upgrade. Thanks.

Mitch

[alfaunits]

If both QD64 and seq. are both capped to 1GB/s, it's almost certainly an IOP cap. LSI 92xx is supposed to be able to go over 2GB/s for read and >1.5GB/s for writes.