Dear Diary,
today the RAID card arrived for my new server. I had apparently only ordered a single SATA cable instead of the six I had meant to order.
But it turned out that the card didn’t use normal SATA cables at all, but a weird one-to-four connector. It’s a big connector on one side, and four separate SATA cables comes out of it.
So for once messing up the order saved me some money.
I installed the card in my 2U machine. As you can see, those weird connectors are pretty high up on the card, which means that the cables take a rather dramatic 90 degree turn. I hope that’s not going to cause any problems… At least the lid closes.
I connected it all up and booted the machine.
04:00.0 RAID bus controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic MegaRAID SAS 2208 [Thunderbolt] (rev 01)
[ 8.636577] megaraid_sas 0000:04:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16
[ 8.637236] megaraid_sas 0000:04:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
[ 8.640920] megasas: FW now in Ready state
[ 8.641300] megaraid_sas 0000:04:00.0: irq 46 for MSI/MSI-X
[ 8.663036] megasas:IOC Init cmd success
It works!
After fiddling aorund in the glorious and very oddly named “WebBIOS” (it’s not actually on the web at all), I managed to set up my test SSD in RAID0. That is, a single Corsair Force 3 disk. Apparently it doesn’t like doing JBOD… At least, I couldn’t find any setting for it.
Writing to the device gives me 480MB/s, while reading gives me 375MB/s. Not all that impressive, but at least is demonstrates that the old backplane really really doesn’t lead to any major problems, since that’s clearly SATA 3 speed.
Now I just have to wait for the Samsung 830s to arrive. Surely they can’t be serious about that horribly late arrival date… I’ll be in Rome by then… I won’t know whether this all works until months and months from now…
Woe is me, Diary.
(Continue reading my secret diary.)