PERC 5/i RAID Card: Tips and Benchmarks - Page 111 - Overclock.net

error10 · 01-30-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by devsk

Is there a temperature sensor on this thing? If yes, is there a way to read it from linux?

Ask Duckie. I don't see one.

binormalkilla · 01-31-09

Ok so I got my BBU cable in the mail today and connected it. When I launch MegaRAID storage manager it shows
BBU Present: No

So do I need to initialize it or anything? Does it need to charge? I thought I remembered reading about some sort of battery command in the CLI.....
I double checked to make sure that the cable was secure on the battery side....I'm about to take the card out and test it for security on the PCB connector.

Any ideas guys?

Quote:

Originally Posted by devsk

Is there a temperature sensor on this thing? If yes, is there a way to read it from linux?

I haven't seen any sensors. I have Everest Ultimate and it's database has just about every sensor and diode in the PC world.......no detection there.

error10 · 01-31-09

The nice boot message said the BBU needs 30 minutes to charge.

binormalkilla · 01-31-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by error10

The nice boot message said the BBU needs 30 minutes to charge.

Well I figured out the problem. My battery module has a bent pin on the end.....:angry:
Looks like I'll have to send it back and get another. I can't bend it back because the pins are just so small......

iakovl · 01-31-09

does anyone here uses the perc with seagate's 1.5T hdd?

SockMan! · 01-31-09

I just noticed something odd with my Perc 5/i. I have a Norco 4020 case which has five 4-slot SATA hot swap backplanes. I noticed that my four hard drives don't get detected or spun up if I stick them on one backplane and connect that backplane to connector 2 on the Perc (the one near the back) but leave the first SAS cable unplugged. However, the hard drives initialize fine if I plug the first SAS cable into an empty backplane.

This probably isn't a problem since I'm going to be connecting all the cables on my Percs anyway; I just though I'd throw this out there in case someone else encountering the same issue is panicking thinking they killed their hardware!

cyberjunkie · 01-31-09

This thread has become so huge, that it will take looong time before i actually get to the last page... and the number of pages is continually growing day by day!
This is a must-say, because i guess that my doubts and my guesses have already some kind of answer on one of those interminable pages.

Anyway, i did some researches before writing this stuff, but i couldn't find a convincing answer.
I gave myself the OK to write this long post anyway, thinking that it may help
many first-time readers coming to the last pages of this thread

First: the first page suggests that by flashing the PERC 5/i with the latest LSI firmware (or some LSI firmware not affected by the "adapter not found on reset/Ctrl-Alt-Del" bug) you can as well use the drivers by LSI. Later on somebody is lamenting that its card is still recognized like a Dell PERC, and somebody else says that a firmware update doesn't change the reality = LSI and Dell cards have a chip and the architecture in common but are actually different, something that is quite evident observing the physical structure of the two cards.
But of course the first poster, who actually started this flooding thread, could do it! Cause all the other infos he gives are quite accurate, and a lot interesting and of great help for the owners of these Dell raid cards.
I have a suspect, something that came to mind reading many pages of this thread, and experimenting a little with my card. I suspect that the behavior of the "Integrated" version differs from the "standalone" version. Of course the integrated version can be fitted with a conventional L-shaped "retainer", like any other PCi card, and stripped of the blue plastic harness that is used to fix it on Dell systems. But my question is, is it true that the Integrated and the non-Integrated versions are exactly the same?
I suspect that the answer is a NO.
Here is my experience:
purchased the card on Ebay for a good price, with 256MB cache and BBU
did a quick SMB fix with a bit of tape
seated it on the PCI-E 16x slot of an Asus P5B Deluxe, with the battery backup unit attached to the card
flashed to LSI firmware 7.0.1-0060 (not the 7.0.1-0061 because reading this forum i was warned that it could show the same problem i have with another LSI raid card, a MegaRAID Elite 1600 Ultra160 scsi more on that later)
attached a single drive (RAID 0) to the controller, just for a test
when the card got recognized i tried to force the lSI driver, but to no avail
i had to install it using the Dell drivers, cause the VEN and DEV IDs weren't changed at all, and at boot the card was recognized like a Dell PERC 5/i Integrated, not an LSI 8408E
installed the LSI management utility for Windows

After all that i found out that the CLI option available with a hot key combination with the LSI 8408E was not available with my card, and that the new firmware made no other obvious differences

I did a few benchmarks, with good but not impressive results, and then i switched back to the Dell firmware, but not the old one that was there when i purchased the card, but the newest one i could find on the incredibly dispersive and messy Dell support pages: v. 5.2.2-0072
I had no need for the MegaCLI command line utility this time, i just used a simple Windows application that did the job with no problems at all.
It's not true what i've read on the forum, that it's impossible to revert to Dell firmware when you have flashed one of the LSI releases.
I could do it within Windows, and with no hassle at all (by chance i used a Windows XP installation, but i can't see why it wouldn't work with other SO)!
The few benchmarks that i have done since then show mixed results, something was better before, something now, but the difference is negligible
Of course the LSI MegaRAID Storage manager still works the same way, but i had to rebuild the virtual drive and set again the preference for the card (Adaptive Read-Ahead, Write Back, Cached I/O).
One very interesting thing is that the firmware for the Integrated and non-Integrated versions are different, of course i flashed the former, but maybe also the other will work, as worked the LSI 8408E firmware.
The Dell drivers i'm using are 2.23.0.32 for Windows Server 2003 x86.
I'm still unsure, after a lot of browsing of Dell support pages, if the firmware and the driver are the latest version: the support pages refer to the computer systems, not the single accessories, and depending on what system you use to get to the drivers and firmware, you'll get different versions! I don't know why, but many are not updated, maybe it's a choice, but i can't see the rationale behind it.
If somebody has found an updated firmware/driver, please let me know.

At this point, i am quite happy with what i've got, and when i'll get a PCI-X mobo for Core Duo's on my hands (an Asus P5WDG2 WS Professional), i will fit it with my PERC 5/i and i'll have no time left for benchmarking and the like, and the card will start its daily job in a cheap ESXi system with support for 64-bit virtual machines.
In the meantime, i'm just too curious to find an answer for my questions.
Is it possible at all to "transform" the PERC 5/i Integrated in an LSI card?
Is the LSI firmware/driver combination giving an edge over Dell's, performance wise?

Another question:
did anybody succeed in reducing the bulk of the card, thus freeing one pci slot, using an active northbridge cooler?
On the mobo i'm experimenting with, if i fit the card on a 4X PCI-E slot, the blocked slot is the one and only PCI-E 1x, that is of vital importance if you want to use a gigabit card and be able to use its full bandwidth: if you want to use Vmware ESX or ESXi the vast majority of integrated gigabit interfaces are not supported, only Intel and Broadcom are, so you need as many working slots as you can have! And forget dual port or quad ports cards, even a standard gigabit PCI-X card can't reach its full speed if fitted in a standard PCI slot!
So if somebody has found a quick and simple way to reduce the width of the card using some kind of active cooling, please post pictures/details.
I have seen a few examples on the forum, but i guess that the goal was to increase the efficiense of cooling, not reducing the slot occupation
I have noticed the adapters on the first page, i understand that they should allow to use of some kind of northbridge coolers, could anybody find them from an european vendor? Everything shipped from the USA is always too expensive...

Last thing (i swear :-)
The problem that affects some firmware releases for the LSI 8408E it's the same that i'm experiencing with my LSI Logic MegaRAID Elite 1600 [493].
When i asked, the otherwise very helpful LSI support people seemed to ignore this problem, stated that the problem was probably with my motherboard's bios settings, and anyway the card is EOL.... :-(
But the involved mobo is a very good old xeon server board (a Supermicro X5DPi-G2 with Intel E7501 chipset), the bios settings are very few, and none that can be involved in this problem.
When i started to browse this thread i learned about this problem: raid card being not recognized/initialized after a CTRL-Alt-Del, a reset, or even a software generated restart.
Exactly what it's happening to me, i thought! So the culprit is the card's firmware, not something else!
This is of no help though, so if anybody knows about a way to fix it, or about an unaffected firmware, please let me know.
Please, it's very annoying, well, the word should be another...
I repeat, it's a MegaRAID Elite 1600, LSI model number 493, originally was a Dell PERC 3/DC fully converted to the corresponding LSI model with a firmware upgrade
Please PM me for suggestions, cause this thread is about something different.

have fun

CJ

SockMan! · 01-31-09

The Perc 5/i should fit into a single slot unless you've got a fat aftermarket heat sink on it. I have mine in two PCI-E x16 slots side-by-side. Of course, make sure you provide enough cooling!

The LSI drivers, as I understand it, have to be forced to install since, as you said, the Perc is still detected as a Dell card even though it's LSI-built. However, you can easily use the newer Dell drivers with the LSI firmware and MegaRAID manager (that's how I do it; I use the Perc 5/i Drivers for the Dell PowerEdge 1900). Older Dell drivers might not work with newer LSI firmware. I don't know if there's any benefit to using the LSI drivers over the Dell drivers.

error10 · 01-31-09

Changing the firmware doesn't change the device's PCI ID (1028:0015) which is what OS drivers use to determine what cards work with the driver. Maybe you can hack the driver INF file. The card uses the same megaraid_sas driver on Linux as with the LSI cards. Out of the box, no forcing anything.

For firmware, I put on the LSI 7.0.1-0064. No problems so far.

As for cooling, I put one of those huge coolers on, and no problems. I also put the card in the lowest slot on the board and it's not blocking anything important (except the EVGA X58's built in power, reset and clear CMOS buttons).

cartmanidis · 01-31-09

Hello, i am a proud owner of 3 of these incredible cards

(without BBU for the time being). My plans are to run them as simple disk controllers on linux, without any raiding or anything, using an Nforce motherboard and a Norco 4020 case, along with Western Digital 1TB GP drives.

From my initial testing I found out that there is no straightforward way to put a single drive into pass-through mode, but there is a trick: Single drive RAID 0 mode without initialization.

Doing that everything works fine, the drive is seen by linux and given a device name, BUT the last 500MB or so of the device are missing, because of a "coerced mode" that the controller uses in order to make the usable capacity of a disk a multiple of 128MB.

With empty drives this should not be a problem, but with full drives this is a huge PITA, as this makes the controller instantly incompatible with all of them, with the only solution being the emptying of the drive using the onboard controller and then formating it on the PERC. With 9 full drives and only one empty one, as you can imagine this job will have to take days and involve at least 10 reboots.

Is there any way to disable "coerced mode" or to use a drive in passthrough mode without the controller fiddling with it in any way?

01-31-09	#1107 (permalink)
cyberjunkie New to Overclock.net Join Date: Dec 2008 Posts: 1 Rep: 0 Unique Rep: 0 Trader Rating: 0	PERC 5/i Integrated and firmware updates, plus other This thread has become so huge, that it will take looong time before i actually get to the last page... and the number of pages is continually growing day by day! This is a must-say, because i guess that my doubts and my guesses have already some kind of answer on one of those interminable pages. Anyway, i did some researches before writing this stuff, but i couldn't find a convincing answer. I gave myself the OK to write this long post anyway, thinking that it may help many first-time readers coming to the last pages of this thread First: the first page suggests that by flashing the PERC 5/i with the latest LSI firmware (or some LSI firmware not affected by the "adapter not found on reset/Ctrl-Alt-Del" bug) you can as well use the drivers by LSI. Later on somebody is lamenting that its card is still recognized like a Dell PERC, and somebody else says that a firmware update doesn't change the reality = LSI and Dell cards have a chip and the architecture in common but are actually different, something that is quite evident observing the physical structure of the two cards. But of course the first poster, who actually started this flooding thread, could do it! Cause all the other infos he gives are quite accurate, and a lot interesting and of great help for the owners of these Dell raid cards. I have a suspect, something that came to mind reading many pages of this thread, and experimenting a little with my card. I suspect that the behavior of the "Integrated" version differs from the "standalone" version. Of course the integrated version can be fitted with a conventional L-shaped "retainer", like any other PCi card, and stripped of the blue plastic harness that is used to fix it on Dell systems. But my question is, is it true that the Integrated and the non-Integrated versions are exactly the same? I suspect that the answer is a NO. Here is my experience: purchased the card on Ebay for a good price, with 256MB cache and BBU did a quick SMB fix with a bit of tape seated it on the PCI-E 16x slot of an Asus P5B Deluxe, with the battery backup unit attached to the card flashed to LSI firmware 7.0.1-0060 (not the 7.0.1-0061 because reading this forum i was warned that it could show the same problem i have with another LSI raid card, a MegaRAID Elite 1600 Ultra160 scsi more on that later) attached a single drive (RAID 0) to the controller, just for a test when the card got recognized i tried to force the lSI driver, but to no avail i had to install it using the Dell drivers, cause the VEN and DEV IDs weren't changed at all, and at boot the card was recognized like a Dell PERC 5/i Integrated, not an LSI 8408E installed the LSI management utility for Windows After all that i found out that the CLI option available with a hot key combination with the LSI 8408E was not available with my card, and that the new firmware made no other obvious differences I did a few benchmarks, with good but not impressive results, and then i switched back to the Dell firmware, but not the old one that was there when i purchased the card, but the newest one i could find on the incredibly dispersive and messy Dell support pages: v. 5.2.2-0072 I had no need for the MegaCLI command line utility this time, i just used a simple Windows application that did the job with no problems at all. It's not true what i've read on the forum, that it's impossible to revert to Dell firmware when you have flashed one of the LSI releases. I could do it within Windows, and with no hassle at all (by chance i used a Windows XP installation, but i can't see why it wouldn't work with other SO)! The few benchmarks that i have done since then show mixed results, something was better before, something now, but the difference is negligible Of course the LSI MegaRAID Storage manager still works the same way, but i had to rebuild the virtual drive and set again the preference for the card (Adaptive Read-Ahead, Write Back, Cached I/O). One very interesting thing is that the firmware for the Integrated and non-Integrated versions are different, of course i flashed the former, but maybe also the other will work, as worked the LSI 8408E firmware. The Dell drivers i'm using are 2.23.0.32 for Windows Server 2003 x86. I'm still unsure, after a lot of browsing of Dell support pages, if the firmware and the driver are the latest version: the support pages refer to the computer systems, not the single accessories, and depending on what system you use to get to the drivers and firmware, you'll get different versions! I don't know why, but many are not updated, maybe it's a choice, but i can't see the rationale behind it. If somebody has found an updated firmware/driver, please let me know. At this point, i am quite happy with what i've got, and when i'll get a PCI-X mobo for Core Duo's on my hands (an Asus P5WDG2 WS Professional), i will fit it with my PERC 5/i and i'll have no time left for benchmarking and the like, and the card will start its daily job in a cheap ESXi system with support for 64-bit virtual machines. In the meantime, i'm just too curious to find an answer for my questions. Is it possible at all to "transform" the PERC 5/i Integrated in an LSI card? Is the LSI firmware/driver combination giving an edge over Dell's, performance wise? Another question: did anybody succeed in reducing the bulk of the card, thus freeing one pci slot, using an active northbridge cooler? On the mobo i'm experimenting with, if i fit the card on a 4X PCI-E slot, the blocked slot is the one and only PCI-E 1x, that is of vital importance if you want to use a gigabit card and be able to use its full bandwidth: if you want to use Vmware ESX or ESXi the vast majority of integrated gigabit interfaces are not supported, only Intel and Broadcom are, so you need as many working slots as you can have! And forget dual port or quad ports cards, even a standard gigabit PCI-X card can't reach its full speed if fitted in a standard PCI slot! So if somebody has found a quick and simple way to reduce the width of the card using some kind of active cooling, please post pictures/details. I have seen a few examples on the forum, but i guess that the goal was to increase the efficiense of cooling, not reducing the slot occupation I have noticed the adapters on the first page, i understand that they should allow to use of some kind of northbridge coolers, could anybody find them from an european vendor? Everything shipped from the USA is always too expensive... Last thing (i swear :-) The problem that affects some firmware releases for the LSI 8408E it's the same that i'm experiencing with my LSI Logic MegaRAID Elite 1600 [493]. When i asked, the otherwise very helpful LSI support people seemed to ignore this problem, stated that the problem was probably with my motherboard's bios settings, and anyway the card is EOL.... :-( But the involved mobo is a very good old xeon server board (a Supermicro X5DPi-G2 with Intel E7501 chipset), the bios settings are very few, and none that can be involved in this problem. When i started to browse this thread i learned about this problem: raid card being not recognized/initialized after a CTRL-Alt-Del, a reset, or even a software generated restart. Exactly what it's happening to me, i thought! So the culprit is the card's firmware, not something else! This is of no help though, so if anybody knows about a way to fix it, or about an unaffected firmware, please let me know. Please, it's very annoying, well, the word should be another... I repeat, it's a MegaRAID Elite 1600, LSI model number 493, originally was a Dell PERC 3/DC fully converted to the corresponding LSI model with a firmware upgrade Please PM me for suggestions, cause this thread is about something different. have fun CJ Last edited by cyberjunkie : 01-31-09 at 02:18 PM

01-31-09	#1110 (permalink)
cartmanidis New to Overclock.net Join Date: Jan 2009 Posts: 2 Rep: 0 Unique Rep: 0 Trader Rating: 0	Simple no raid mode Hello, i am a proud owner of 3 of these incredible cards (without BBU for the time being). My plans are to run them as simple disk controllers on linux, without any raiding or anything, using an Nforce motherboard and a Norco 4020 case, along with Western Digital 1TB GP drives. From my initial testing I found out that there is no straightforward way to put a single drive into pass-through mode, but there is a trick: Single drive RAID 0 mode without initialization. Doing that everything works fine, the drive is seen by linux and given a device name, BUT the last 500MB or so of the device are missing, because of a "coerced mode" that the controller uses in order to make the usable capacity of a disk a multiple of 128MB. With empty drives this should not be a problem, but with full drives this is a huge PITA, as this makes the controller instantly incompatible with all of them, with the only solution being the emptying of the drive using the onboard controller and then formating it on the PERC. With 9 full drives and only one empty one, as you can imagine this job will have to take days and involve at least 10 reboots. Is there any way to disable "coerced mode" or to use a drive in passthrough mode without the controller fiddling with it in any way?

		Overclock.net - Overclocking.net > Components > Hard Drives & Storage > RAID Controllers and Software
PERC 5/i RAID Card: Tips and Benchmarks

01-31-09	#1106 (permalink)
SockMan! New to Overclock.net Join Date: Jan 2009 Posts: 24 Rep: 3 Unique Rep: 3 Trader Rating: 0	I just noticed something odd with my Perc 5/i. I have a Norco 4020 case which has five 4-slot SATA hot swap backplanes. I noticed that my four hard drives don't get detected or spun up if I stick them on one backplane and connect that backplane to connector 2 on the Perc (the one near the back) but leave the first SAS cable unplugged. However, the hard drives initialize fine if I plug the first SAS cable into an empty backplane. This probably isn't a problem since I'm going to be connecting all the cables on my Percs anyway; I just though I'd throw this out there in case someone else encountering the same issue is panicking thinking they killed their hardware!

01-31-09	#1108 (permalink)
SockMan! New to Overclock.net Join Date: Jan 2009 Posts: 24 Rep: 3 Unique Rep: 3 Trader Rating: 0	The Perc 5/i should fit into a single slot unless you've got a fat aftermarket heat sink on it. I have mine in two PCI-E x16 slots side-by-side. Of course, make sure you provide enough cooling! The LSI drivers, as I understand it, have to be forced to install since, as you said, the Perc is still detected as a Dell card even though it's LSI-built. However, you can easily use the newer Dell drivers with the LSI firmware and MegaRAID manager (that's how I do it; I use the Perc 5/i Drivers for the Dell PowerEdge 1900). Older Dell drivers might not work with newer LSI firmware. I don't know if there's any benefit to using the LSI drivers over the Dell drivers.

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