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Since I bought my IBM Serveraid M5014 (LSI Megaraid 9240 w/ RAID 6 disabled and less cache) I have had not a single issue with any of my arrays running under Windows, unlike my previously Adaptec 1430SA which had issues almost every few months. So with that in mind I picked up an actual LSI Megaraid 9240 4i (4 Port SAS / SATA 6Gb/s) controller to build my new Linux server around. What a mistake!

At first I tried the standard Debian 6.0.4 Squeeze installer disk which didn’t even detect the card. Next I did some Googling and found that LSI had drivers on their site for Debian Squeeze, no love there. The drivers they made available were for the previous distribution of Debian aka Lenny, and as this server was going to be a web server I wanted the better multitasking support which almost always means a newer kernel.

Next I tried the Debian Testing installer disk which uses Kernel 3.2.0. This time things seemed to be going a little bit better until I started getting Stack Overflows. That was the end of trying the 3.2.0 kernel.

Finally I tried a custom Debian Squeeze installer with a backported 2.6.39 kernel, which gave me exactly the same issues as the Debian Testing installer.
Maybe it was the fact that I was using a DH67BL (H67 Chipset) board which has UEFI, maybe it was bad drivers, but whatever the case there is only so much time I am willing to invest on something as simple as configuring a RAID adapter. Which adapter did I settle on? My older Highpoint RocketRaid 3120 SATA II 2 port controller which has worked like a charm since the first time I installed it.

*Note If LSI had responded to my support email I would have been a little bit nicer, but as I say they most likely hate Linux and supporting it. Now what to do with a 4 port SAS 2 paper weight.

I consider myself to be a pretty hardcore AMD fan, and I’ve been purchasing AMD products since the AMD 80386DX-40 which was a 386 chip that ran 7 Mhz faster than Intel’s fastest. Since then I’ve had a K6-2, Duron 800, Athlon 1Ghz, Athlon 1.4Ghz, Athlon 1900+, Athlon 2400+, Athlon 3200+, Athlon64 X2 4600+, Athlon64 X2 6000+, Phenom X4 9850, Phenom X4 955, and Phenom X6 1090T. I even have a Gateway Netbook I’ve upgraded from an Athlon64 X2 L110 to an L310.

As you can see I tend to upgrade my CPU fairly frequently as only recently has technology caught up with my needs, and general impatience with computers. In fact the current generation of hardware on the market meets my general needs, with the exception of power use. When I lived at home with my parents I never thought about the amount of power my computer(s) used, but now that I am a parent I seem to be trying to save money where ever I can.

Right now the bane of my power usage is my HTPC which I consider to be ridiculously over powered with a Phenom X4 955 Black Edition and onboard Radeon HD 3300. Once upon a time I used my HTPC to game on, but now all it gets used for is playing MP3s, and kids movies (AVI, MPG, MKV, H.264). The only thing even a little bit taxing are playing back HD H.264 1080p, luckily newer generation video hardware has H.264 acceleration built in meaning that CPU does very little work.

When I read about the Asus E45M1-M PRO in the beginning of September 2011 I knew I had found my HTPC solution. The Asus E45M1-M PRO is powered by the AMD Fusion E-450 chip, the successor to the Fusion E-350 chip. AMD Fusion APU Processors are a melding of a CPU, GPU, and memory controller onto a single chip which cuts down on latency, power usage, and components required on the motherboard. The Fusion E-450 APU has a dual core 1.65Ghz CPU, builtin Radeon 6320, and DDR3 1333 memory controller.

Despite being released on September 7th the Asus E45M1-M PRO is nowhere to be found in North America. I can find multiple manufacturers with Fusion E-350 solutions, but the only E-450 solutions are in Netbooks / Laptops. Now what is really disappointing me is the fact that these boards are for sale in the Europe for absolutely ridiculously high prices. I think AMD isn’t allowing these boards to be sold in North America so their LLano sales won’t be cannibalized, otherwise companies like Powercolor which demoed Fusion E-450 ITX last year (1 Jun 2011) would have brought it to market.

If you’re looking for an AMD Fusion APU / CPU / GPU motherboard that there are multiple AMD chipsets that manufacturers can use, if you are looking for future proofing your purchase make sure it has an A75 or Hudson M1 chip not an A45 or Hudson D1 chip. Otherwise you will not have SATA3 (A45 / D1), or USB 3 (M1, A45, D1). Note some manufacturers add additional chips to add functionality like USB3 to their products.

Generally every boxing day I like to splurge on myself a little bit, and hit up the yearly boxing day sale. Although NCIX has no concept of how time works in North America (their sale hasn’t started a 5PM the last 3 years), they can have some good sales prices (the regular prices aren’t that great). Having recently got back into content management system development I decided this year I would build a new server to colocate at We Do Hosting.

In building my new server my goals were to keep the power down, RAID SATA3 SSDs in RAID 1, give me future upgradeability, and most importantly be cheap (I am 1/16 Jewish so I am only 1/2 as cheap as my dad). After much research, thought, and bad experiences with onboard AMD raid I decided on a Sandy Bridge LGA1155 system running low latency DDR3 1333mhz.
Dual Core Sandy Bridge CPUs start at $54, and go quickly up from there depending on the functionality you require. To get into a DDR3 1333 you will need at least a Pentium G800 series, or a second generation Core i3/i5/i7. The cheapest G800 series chip I could find from a Canadian supplier was the G850 which is a dual core 2.9Ghz Sandy Bridge with 3MB of L3 cache for $86.96, if you go up to $100 you can get a G860 which is 3.0Ghz.

I was actually seriously considering the G860 processor as I felt it was wrong to go from a dual core LGA775 E8400 3.0Ghz Wolfdale, down to a 2.9Ghz Sandy Bridge chip. However after a lot more research I decided on a Core i3 to get the additional 2 hyper threading cores, and either a 3.3Ghz or 3.4Ghz bus speed (Core i3 2120 or 2130 respectively). At this point I was up to around a $139 or $150 budget, what an increase from the original Celeron Sandy Bridge CPU I was looking at. So I decided to wait for boxing day.
So when December 24th came around I was at my computer 10 minutes prior to the start of the NCIX 2011 boxing day sale, with a goal of spending $150 on a processor and to pickup an H67 B3 motherboard. Now with computers and door crasher specials I’ve come to realize sometimes you spend a little bit more than you expected to you get than you end up with more than you expect. When the sale started and I saw a Core i5 2500K 3.3Ghz / 3.7Ghz turbo boost with 6MB L3 for just $189 I jumped at it, matched it up with an Intel BOXDH67BL rev B3 board (price matched to $94), and upgraded my desktop memory to salvage a G.Skill 8GB of DDR3 1333 7-7-7 Ripjaw series kit.

When building a web server you should always try to minimize any sort of latency within your system to maximize your page load speeds, giving you more responsive load times, and allow you to handle more traffic with less resources. When choosing DDR3 latency is extremely important as for 1333mhz the difference between 7-7-7 and 9-9-9 timings is close to 30% more latency! For 7-7-7 the CAS latency is 10 1/2ns at 1333MHz, and at 9-9-9 is 13 1/2ns. That might not sound like much but when you start considering potentially loading up to 100,000+ page / day on a busy server that is a lot of CPU time waiting in an IO wait cycles.

Now all I need are some SSD SATA3 drives to RAID, and I’ll put together some performance articles.

For quite a while I’ve been suspecting that there is some sort of conspiracy going on over at Sandforce that is limiting manufacturers to produce SF-2281 SSD drives of approved sizes. Sandforce SF-2281 drives have now been on the market for over 6 months and yet there are still only 5 sizes available 60GB, 90GB, 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB. There is also a Corsair 180GB Force Series GT SSD, however I can’t find it online in stock anywhere other than special order.

If you look at the previous generation SF-1200 controller based drives you will see the following sizes 40GB, 50GB, 60GB, 64GB, 80GB, 90GB, 100GB, 115GB, 120GB, 128GB, 160GB, 180GB, 200GB, 240GB, 256GB, 320GB, 360GB, 400GB, and 480GB. A grand total of 15 sizes (I’m only counting sizes that end with a 0 as others may be different levels of over provisioning). Right now I am using a Edge Tech BOost Pro 120GB for my operating system drive, but when it is full I would rather replace it with a 160GB or 180GB SF-2281 SSD at a more affordable price. Hopefully LSI will bring some sense to Sandforce.

I spoke with one of my SSD manufacturer contacts this morning, and he let me know there is a brand new SF-2281 firmware coming very soon. From what I hear the firmware will be released Friday and will support flash memory configurations that deliver up to 80,000 iops! In real world benchmarks we won’t see numbers nearly that high as the highest iops I’ve seen from a SF-2281 based drive so far is 34,096 write iops, and 27,386 read iops but I’d be happy with closer to 45,000-60,000 iops…. Keep in mind however I haven’t tried the OCZ Vertex 3 Max iops drive which is considerably more expensive than the average SF-2281 drive. Now that LSI is purchasing Sandforce I am starting to envision SATA 6GB/s and SAS 12GB/s SSDs raided on Megaraid controllers with extremely high iops in RAID 5.

There was a time when you could grab just about any consumer desktop hard drive, and set them up as a RAID array.  In the past I’ve used the following Western Digital drives in RAID: WD3200SD (320GB RE RAID 1), WD6400AAKS (640GB 7200rpm pre BLUE 2 x RAID 1 arrays), WD10EADS (1.0TB WD Green RAID 1), WD1001FALS (1.0TB WD Black RAID 1), and WD15EARS (1.5TB WD Green RAID 1).  Overall I’ve had mixed experiences when using the non RAID edition drives, and I’m going to share some of my experiences.

The first thing you should know is in the last 2 years Western Digital has started hobbling their desktop drives in the firmware to make them bad to use in RAID arrays.  What Western Digital has done is removed / disabled a feature called TLER from their desktop drives firmware.  TLER standards for Time-Limited Error Recovery which reduces the amount of time a drive can take to return an error status when an error occurs.

The problem becomes as drives become larger, and larger it can take longer to determine if a drive is having an issue or error.  This is where TLER comes in which by default sets an error to be reported  within a maximum of 7 seconds.  If you don’t enable TLER than your likely to have drives drop out of arrays, and have those arrays become degraded.  Reading the forums there have been people that RMA’d TLER enabled drives to Western Digital, and have received drives back which no longer support TLER.  Some of these people have reported that their arrays failed to rebuilt onto the new non TLER drives.

Now all of the RAID arrays above I have created have not had TLER enabled, but they have all been RAID 1 so I have had very few issues.  Luckily none of my issues have resulted in any sort of data loss from my RAID arrays, and most of the issues only required a simple rebuilt in the RAID Controller bios, or through RAID software (Adaptec Storage Manager).

Recently when my Adaptec 1430SA RAID controller died I decided to upgrade my RAID arrays, and come up with a more enterprise style solution (hardware RAID) which has resulted in doing a lot of research into topics like TLER and other storage vendors.  While doing my research I found out that I could go back and enable TLER on some of my older drives via a Western Digital tool called WDTLER.exe.  Since then I’ve managed to enable TLER on 4 x WD6400AAKS, 3 x WD1001FALS,  2 x WD10EADS, and was unsuccessful on both of my WD15EARS drives. Download WD_Tools.rar to enable TLER on your Western Digital drives.

After I had enabled TLER on my Western Digital Black 1TB WD1001FALS drives I noticed doing chkdsk under Windows 7 that both of the drives had developed 512KB of bad sectors.  Now rotation drives will develop bad sectors as magnet coating ages, but having two drives from the same array develop exactly the same amount of bad sectors is more than a little fishy.  In fact if I had to guess I would suspect that one of the drives took too longer to respond to some sort of error check, and then my old Adaptec 1430SA recovered the data (I hope) and marked the sectors as bad on both drives.  Could having enabling TLER originally have prevented these bad sectors?  I couldn’t even speculate.

Now onto the subject of Bad Sectors on Western Digital drives, and how potentially recover them.  Based on the premise that either one or both of these 512KB of bad sectors were falsely marked I did some research on how to restore them on Western Digital drives.  There were two possible solutions first was to low level format your hard drive (unadviseable), and the second was to write 0s to the drive with WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics and then verify the drive with an extended scan.

Unfortunately the WD Diag can only test one drive at a time, and these tests can take a while when testing 1TB+ (approx 2.5 hours 0 write cycle, and 2.5 hour extended verify cycle) disk drives.  After writing zeros to the first drive, verifying, and formatting it the bad sectors disappeared. So the question became is the second drive bad, or did the Adaptec 1430SA for some unknown reason mark good sectors as bad.  Also keep in mind that it may have left this sector marked as bad and used space reserved to replace bad sectors, as I have no idea how Western Digital programs their firmware / testing app.

Prior to my Adaptec 1430SA SATA2 controller crapping out I had been considering upgrading my main data RAID 1 array of Western Digital 1.5TB EARS Green drives over to a set of Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 2TB 7200rpm drives. This would have given me a 33% increase in capacity, and a very nice speed bump for post processing 26MB Canon CR2 Raw photos. Let alone for the number of times my Adaptec 1430SA RAID array would go offline into Verify mode, which required my system to do a full disk array verify prior to my data being available again (2×1.0TB Blacks Raid 1 array; 6 hours verify, 2×1.5TB Green Raid 1 array; 8 hours verify).

Personally speaking having my data unavailable for 8 hours when working at home as a web developer, web application programmer, and SEO is just unacceptable. So the first thing I did was reached out to Adaptec and spoke with an amazingly helpful support staff member (Luis). After debugging the issue with my Adaptec 1430SA I was informed that my card was defective, and they would be happy to RMA my card and give me another Adaptec 1430SA. In all honestly the only thing I will do with an RMA’d Adaptec 1430SA is sell it to some unsuspecting Adaptec fan like myself who just wanted a cheap SATA2 300 Raid adapter.

Since my RAID arrays have gone offline over a month ago I’ve built myself a Debian Linux Squeeze 6.0 server with a Highpoint Rocketraid 3120 RAID controller, and two Western Digital 320GB RE (First Generation Raid Edition) 7200rpm drives which I purchased in early 2006. For just doing Samba, Apache, PHP, MySQL you don’t need much so paired with an Intel Wolfdale Core 2 Duo E84000 3.0Ghz processor the performance is still very descent except for when working on very large websites and searching for code (especially Content Management Systems). However 320GB is just a fraction of my offline arrays (2.2TB), so I was craving something a little more.

If there is one thing I have been known to do when computer hardware frustrate me, and gives me grief is to replace them. So having had a bad experience with an Adaptec 1430SA SATA2 software RAID controller, and having recently fell in love with the speed of Sandforce SF-2281 based SSDs such as the Edge Boost Pro 120GB I decided to find myself a PCI Express RAID card capable of benchmarking SATA3 600 SSD drives in various RAID configurations with over 1,000MB/s read speeds (honestly I’m too paranoid to run SSD drives in RAID 0 like a lot of people but I’ll benchmark them for reviews). So this meant finding a SATA3 RAID Controller which also uses at least 4 PCI Express 2.0 lanes (each lane has 500MB/s of bus bandwidth).

In my personal experience there is only one place to find high quality RAID adapters at amazing prices, and that is Ebay. After doing a lot of research I had my decision down to either the Adaptec 6805E 8 port SAS 2.0 / SATA 3, or the LSI Megaraid 9260-8i. After some thought, and doing even more research and a slight bias against Adaptec (even though I’ve bought 4 Adaptec RAID adapters in the past, and the Adaptec has a dual core PMC processor) I went with the LSI Megaraid 9260-8i. The thing I love about the LSI Megaraid series is that so many companies resell these controllers as OEM RAID controller there are always used Megaraid controller showing up on Ebay whether they are DELL, HP, IBM, Lenovo, or even Intel. Used Raid controller prices also tend to go down when there is a newer model on the market in this case the LSI Megaraid 9265 which has a dual core version of the LSISAS2108 processor on the Megaraid 9260.
Note: Do your research when purchasing OEM products, some brands lock their RAID controllers to their brand OEM drives (think about price premiums here compared to market prices).

In the end I purchased an IBM ServeRaid M5014 LSI Megaraid 9260-8i SAS 2.0 / SATA3 600 8 port controller, which plugs into a PCI Express 2.0 x8 Slot giving it an amazing 4,000MB/s of bandwidth and Supports RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 10, and 50 (RAID 6 and 60 support with the optional M5000 Advanced Feature Key) with an 800mhz PowerPC and 256MB of DDR3 cache. This controller retails for up to $500, and I managed to snag a IBM ServeRaid M5014 for just $138! This is what I call upgrading for the future, now all I needed was some hard drives. So now that major retail stores are running out of stock of hard drives, and some prices having doubled due to the Flooding in Thailland I had no choice but to think used hard drives to save money.

So for the past 3 weeks I have been watching Ebay for new and used hard drives, and it has been amazing to watch as prices have gone higher, and higher, and yet higher and stocks lower. About the best deal I found was used Western Digital RE3 1TB for $95 each + shipping, sadly someone bought all 10 of the hard drives he had in one lot before I bought them. After losing out on that auction I remembered that I have 4 Western Digital Caviar 640GB 7200rpm WD6400AAKS drives that were produced prior to them being rebadged to the Caviar Blue drives. With the LSI Megaraid 9260-8i, and 3 drive RAID5 w/ Hotspare I would have roughly 1,250MB (1.25TB) enough to start migrating the data off of my offline arrays back into accessibility.

The moral here is when prices start going way up it doesn’t always hurt to try and save some money on used and enterprise hardware as you may end up with a better more affordable solution in the end. For the price of the two Hitachi Deskstar drives on sale $199 for both (current price $232 each) I have a new RAID array that although it has lower capacity it is higher in performance. Not to mention 4 additional ports that I am not even using yet, and the overall how sexy SFF-8087 connector to 4 SATA connectors are for de-cluttering my case.

Also coming soon is a new article on another thrifty technology Hybrid SSD + Rotation drive RAID performance. The folks over at LYCOM were kind enough to send me a Lycom PE-115m 6G SATA Hybrid Drives HBA with mSATA socket RAID controller which I have paired up with a Runcore T50 Sandforce Sf-2281 mSATA drive. I’m fairly certain this will end up in my Linux box as a MySQL and HTTP accelerator solution with RAID 1.

Anyone that has been watching rotational hard drive prices for the last 2 months has seen increases in pricing that no one could have foreseen.  Two months ago I was waffling over buying a Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 2TB 7200rpm drive on sale for $99 CAD at NCIX.  As of today these drives retail for $219.98, and NCIX hasn’t put a rotational hard drive on sale for nearly 3 weeks.

These rotational drive price increases haven’t just hit Hitachi, but all the major brands including Western Digital, Seagate, Samsung, and their OEM resellers (Dell, HP, IBM, Acer, Asus etc).  Personally I expect one of three scenarios:

• Rotation drive prices will continue to rise to prices that are currently unimaginable.
• Rotation drive manufacturers might run completely out of stock of certain parts used to manufacturer certain models causing more extreme shortages. Already NCIX has large numbers of external drives that are no longer in stock, and companies like Acer have raised desktop and laptop computer prices.
• Manufacturers like Seagate who haven’t had their manufacturing as hurt by the Thailand flooding will manage to bring drives to the market cheaper than their competitors, and attain higher market shares while their competitors fumble to get their rotation drive manufacturing capacity back to previous levels.

Although this may sound like doom, and gloom for the rotation hard drive industry it will definitely result in cheaper SSD prices due to higher demand resulting in increased flash production (rule of demand resulting in increased supply).  Unfortunately current Solid State drives are a fraction of the size required for doing any sort of practical archiving.

Right now I have 2 RAID1 arrays 2×1.5TB Western Digital Greens, and 2X1.0TB Western Digital Blacks.  As I mentioned I am looking to upgrade to 2TB 7200rpm drives to replace the 1.5TB array, unfortunately the only 2TB SSDs are PCI-e based and cost approximately $5,699.99 each!  So forget about them being affordable, let alone raiding two of those beasts for redundancy.  Can PCI-E SSDs even be raided?

On October 26th, 2011 LSI announced they had an agreement to acquire Sandforce.  When I first heard this I had to give my head a shake as this is massive news in the storage industry, in fact I can’t think of a better match made in heaven.  Sandforce makes some of the fastest SSD controllers on the market, and LSI makes some of the fastest RAID controllers on the market.

In my opinion this acquisition gives LSI several advantages over major storage competitors like Adaptec such as:

• Fully Certified Storage Enterprise Storage Solutions – Not only will LSI be able to manufacture RAID adapters, but they will also manufacture enterprise level SSD drives meaning that if there are issues they will be caught during pre-production testing.
• Rapid Adoption of Emerging Technologies – With technologies like SAS 3.0 / 12Gb/s on the horizon it won’t be long until LSI has an SSD controller chip that supports this technology.  In fact I’d wager within the next 12 months we will see a SAS SSD that pushes over 1,000MB/s.
• New IC Resellers – Sandforce has quite an impressive list of storage vendors already using their products (OCZ, Runcore, ADATA, Kingston, Patriot, and others), combined with LSI’s vendors (Intel, IBM, HP, Dell) we are going to see the enterprise storage sector rapidly evolve their products.
• Experienced Firmware Developers – LSI already provides some of the fastest RAID adapter firmware, but you can never have enough experienced firmware developers to help improve your products.

Not only will LSI see the advantages of this acquisition but so will the existing Sandforce customers.  Recently Sandforce took a massive beating in the industry for releasing the Sandforce SF-2281 controller which had some nasty firmware bugs, the kind of bugs no end user wants in their hard drive.  I personally experienced this issue with 3 different Sandforce SF-2281 based drives which caused my system to BSOD every 6-24 hours.  These issues were not constrained to just one platform but multiple platforms (AMD + Intel), and they should have been caught during pre-production product testing. With a larger set of storage vendors (Intel for one) more issues should be caught.

Here at SSD Flash Drive Reviews we look forward to seeing what LSI our new storage overlords will produce.