There are plenty of conclusions to draw from this – for peak throughput, the LSI ports are preferred. In terms of peak speeds using ATTO, we recorded the following results: LSI Chip with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 drives (listed as SAS x) via MegaRAIDĬhipset with 1, 2 drives on SATA 6 Gbps (listed as x+0)Ĭhipset with 1, 2, 3, 4 drives on SATA 3 Gbps (listed as (0+x)Ĭhipset with 1 drive on SATA 6 Gbps and 1, 2, 3, 4 drives on SATA 3 Gbps (listed as 1+x)Ĭhipset with 2 drives on SATA 6 Gbps and 1, 2, 3, 4 drives on SATA 3 Gbps (listed as 2+x)Īll chipset scenarios were set using the RAID from BIOS rather than in the OS. As the LSI has no access to additional cache like a PCIe card, we will see that the peak performance lies more in bulk sequential transfers, rather than small transfers.įor the tests, we used the standard ATTO benchmark and the following scenarios in RAID-0: With this in mind, we tested several scenarios for bandwidth and 4K performance with the LSI chip. This unfortunately adds a large amount of time to the booting of the system, around 40-50 more seconds. There is also an option to allow booting from the LSI chip, via Port 7. The LSI chip by default is set to run in PCIe 3.0 mode in the BIOS. The virtual drive then needs to be mounted in Windows, using the Disk Management tool. Both are very limited in their options, especially as we can only choose one stripe size – 64KB. We then get an option to select either an Easy mode for creating the virtual drive, or an advanced mode. In order to create array, we select the ‘Create Virtual Drive’ option. After a login screen, we are presented with the following:
With the drives plugged in and powered (I had to rummage for suitable power connectors), the LSI software provided (MegaRAID) on the ASRock Driver DVD is loaded and run. Thus the preferred scenario here will be RAID 10 across eight drives, thus taking advantage of striping across 4 of the drives but also having them mirrored. Running eight drives in RAID 0 is a unique real world scenario, due to the fail rate potentially wiping all the data, but it does allow us to study peak throughput. I would have expected some users to require RAID 5 or 6. The LSI controller allows for RAID 0, 1 and 10 only, which is a little odd. This is in comparison to the C60x server based chipsets for Sandy Bridge-E and Xeon processors based on the 2011 socket, which allow for up to eight SAS/SATA drives limited to SATA 3 Gbps and chipset throughput. The LSI SAS controller supports SAS2 and SATA 6 Gbps drives. Due to the routing of the LSI chip via PCIe 3.0 lanes, our bandwidth ceiling is lifted as we do not have to go via the chipset. These drives are rated for 500 MBps+ sequential read and write speeds, and are based on the LSI SF-2281 controller. As part of this review, ASRock were kind enough to provide a set of eight ADATA XPG SX910 256GB drives in order to test the LSI SAS/SATA ports on the motherboard.