ServeTheHome.com

It is a well known practice that many vendors re-brand LSI RAID cards and host bus adapters (HBAs) using different firmware and re-sell them as their own. Oftentimes, re-branded cards are less expensive to acquire than their LSI counterparts making re-brands highly desirable. Read the full story

A lot of users on this site, and of Windows Home Server, FreeNAS and OpenSolaris look for compatible RAID controllers that are both supported and inexpensive. For these users, both the older SAS 3.0 and SATA II LSI 1068e chipet and the newer LSI SAS 2008 are favorites. The LSI 1068e was an extremely popular RAID chipset that has the ability to be flashed to IT firmware to turn the controllers into (more or less) SAS Expander aware host bus adapters (HBAs). It is supported under most operating systems and was used by many OEM vendors. Read the full story

Since publishing the Intel SASUC8I and LSI SAS3081E-R 1068e Based RAID Controller Review I have received quite a few questions regarding how to flash the LSI IT firmware to the Intel card. This guide shows one how to get around the sasflash utility’s vendor check. Read the full story

With the rise of Windows Home Server, VAIL, Aurora, the venerable Linux file servers (e.g. ones based on CentOS and Openfiler), and ZFS enabled OSes such as FreeBSD and OpenSolaris with their NAS derivatives (e.g. FreeNAS and EON ZFS Storage), users have a strong alternative to hardware RAID controllers. These operating systems have the ability to use raw disks and manage data redundancy without the use of RAID controllers.

For smaller installations, such as 2-6 drive configurations, onboard Intel ICH10 or ICH10R controllers are a best bet due to their compatibility and very low cost. When drive counts expand, so must the servers SATA port count. With traditional RAID controllers, a user is limited to including ports physically located on the storage controller. Therefore to connect fourteen drives a user typically needs a sixteen port or greater RAID card because hardware RAID arrays generally cannot span different controllers. Using a software RAID or RAID-like solution one is not limited by these barriers and can utilize ports on motherboards as well as on add-in controllers. Read the full story

My main server, the Big WHS now houses over 60TB of storage, runs multiple VM’s, and has over 10 Gigabit NICs. At the heart of this server, is a Supermicro X8ST3-F. It was not the first motherboard I tried in the server, as I originally tried using an ASUS P6T7 WS Supercomputer in the Big WHS, but it has been running solidly since its first installation. Aside from its stability, it also comes with many PCIe slots, an onboard LSI 1068e based 8 port SATA/ SAS controller, dual Intel Gigabit NICs, onboard video, and IPMI 2.0 with KVM over IP.

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