[FS] (3) IBM BR10i (flashed to LSI 1068E IT mode for unRAID!) SAS Cards [SOLD]

[savestheday]

I'm upgrading my IBM BR10i's to cards that support 6gbps so here I am selling my fairly new (couple weeks old) cards...these are in MINT condition.

 

$50 shipped per card.  

 

Get at me if interested!!

 

[uPDATE]

Only one left now, thanks for the business Chem13!!

 

[uPDATE2]

All of them gone, thanks guys!

[Superorb]

Do any of them include the brackets?

[savestheday]

All of them include brackets.  They're currently in my Norco case.  Here's a screenshot to show you they're working:

 

[SSD]

This is an x8 controller and mine works very well. Only negative is it does not support drives larger than 2.2T. If you understand this limitation, go for it. Personally I have plenty of 2T drives, and using them on this controller allows me to use other ports for the 3T drives. But I know eventually this controller will be obsolete unless LSI does a firmware update, which is looking pretty unlikely.

[madburg]

This is an x8 controller and mine works very well. Only negative is it does not support drives larger than 2.2T. If you understand this limitation, go for it. Personally I have plenty of 2T drives, and using them on this controller allows me to use other ports for the 3T drives. But I know eventually this controller will be obsolete unless LSI does a firmware update, which is looking pretty unlikely.

 

Ran into this post, and I have to be honest I am pretty confused how you work bjp999.

 

How did you come to the conclusion that the BR10i’s don’t support drives larger than 2.2 TB? I asked you this question multiple times in the forums as I knew you had at least one BR10i and at least one 3TB drive, yet you never answered once. But you have a lot to say in this one selected post… find this VERY interesting and disappointed at the same time.

 

The correct answer is you can use 3TB drive with this controller but will only be able to utilize 2.2TB of the 3TB’s on this controller.

 

The card will be no more obsolete that more than half the hardware people use currently with unRAID. That card is not going anywhere anytime soon. It works on all OS’s including VM ESX passthrough, where other cards easily fail or need advance ESX skills to get working. The 1068E chipset is a champ.

 

If LSI decides to or if can physically get it to utilize/see all 3TB is to be seen. Yes there has not been a new patch for it last when most of their other cards did, but the 1068E is 10 patches ahead of most other LSI cards because it’s been around for so long, tried and true, and it could possibly be in the works, and it may not. Time will tell.

 

There are plenty of people here that don’t need MONSTOR builds and dont need to squeeze out 60TB in one chassis, I would get this card over ANY SuperMicro card (they have nice products in other areas, but not in controllers).

 

So my 2 cents, is this is a GREAT deal at $50 bucks, while these cards can be had.

 

[SSD]

This is an x8 controller and mine works very well. Only negative is it does not support drives larger than 2.2T. If you understand this limitation, go for it. Personally I have plenty of 2T drives, and using them on this controller allows me to use other ports for the 3T drives. But I know eventually this controller will be obsolete unless LSI does a firmware update, which is looking pretty unlikely.

 

Ran into this post, and I have to be honest I am pretty confused how you work bjp999.

 

How did you come to the conclusion that the BR10i’s don’t support drives larger than 2.2 TB? I asked you this question multiple times in the forums as I knew you had at least one BR10i and at least one 3TB drive, yet you never answered once. But you have a lot to say in this one selected post… find this VERY interesting and disappointed at the same time.

 

The correct answer is you can use 3TB drive with this controller but will only be able to utilize 2.2TB of the 3TB’s on this controller.

 

The card will be no more obsolete that more than half the hardware people use currently with unRAID. That card is not going anywhere anytime soon. It works on all OS’s including VM ESX passthrough, where other cards easily fail or need advance ESX skills to get working. The 1068E chipset is a champ.

 

If LSI decides to or if can physically get it to utilize/see all 3TB is to be seen. Yes there has not been a new patch for it last when most of their other cards did, but the 1068E is 10 patches ahead of most other LSI cards because it’s been around for so long, tried and true, and it could possibly be in the works, and it may not. Time will tell.

 

There are plenty of people here that don’t need MONSTOR builds and dont need to squeeze out 60TB in one chassis, I would get this card over ANY SuperMicro card (they have nice products in other areas, but not in controllers).

 

So my 2 cents, is this is a GREAT deal at $50 bucks, while these cards can be had.

 

 

Sorry if you feel I dissed you in another thread.  It was not on purpose.  If you'd PM me with a link when I don't respond in a reasonable amount of time, I will respond to missed or forgotten posts.  You DID PM me the other day with a technical question, and I did answer it quickly, so I'm not all bad.

 

It is not really relevant that you can use a 3T drive on this controller and get 2.2T of space.  No one would want to do that.  I stand by my point that this controller does not support 3T drives (as 3T drives).  No other unRAID systems share this type of known obsolescence.

 

The fact that not everyone wants monster arrays has nothing to do with the drive sizes people select.  People tend to choose the best price per gig, and when it is close people tend to go with the bigger drives so they have more room to grow (and also use less electricity).  We are at the teetering point between 2T and 3T right now, and more and more people are going to 3T.  Soon 3T drives will rule new purchases in unRAIDland (IMHO).

 

$50 is not such a great deal on this unless you have a bunch of 2T drives that you plan to use for the next 4-5 years.  For $50 more you could get a 3T compatible SuperMicro controller.  It may not be "technologically superior", but it is "compatible" with 3T and hopefully larger drives.  For $100 more than the BR10i you could get a M1015, flash it, and have the "technological superior" LSI controller that support 3T drives.

 

On the topic of LSI, I think those guys are pretty sleezy.   Their older cards that came out in the 1T drive days was called the "8000 series" RAID controllers.  When 1.5T and 2T drives came out, they were recognized and appeared to work fine on these controllers and people used them to create RAID arrays.  UNTIL a drive in the RAID array failed and someone tried to rebuild it.  The firmware didn't support rebuilding the larger drives.  Instead of fixing the firmware to rebuild, LSI just said it wasn't supported and basically put thumb to nose to those customers.  (HERE is a link to their official response) There is no way, IMO, that this company is going to come out with a firmware update to the inexpensive 1068E.  They'd rather make people buy a new model.  Our best hope, IMO, is someone to hack the firmware.  Would LOVE to be proven wrong here, BTW, so feel free to rub my nose in it if I am wrong.

 

Sorry again for unintentional missing of your posts.  If you post links to anything you'd still like me to respond, I will do so.

 

Savestheday - hope this doesn't hurt sales too much.  I will say again - I have one of these and it works great!  Would be raving about it from the highest hilltops if it supported 3T drives, but it doesn't.  For anyone that is using all or most of their slots, and would like nothing more than a controller to move all their 2T to, to free up motherboard and/or other controller slots for 3T drives, this is a great option and a great price.

[PhilH]

Damn bjp999 it looks like you must have peed in someones Cherios.  I have read several threads were people were mad at you. Or at least misunderstood you. I haven't seen it that way & please don't be discourged by these people. You have always been very helpful & I hope you will continue to be into the future.

 

Phil

 

 

[JackBauer]

 

It is not really relevant that you can use a 3T drive on this controller and get 2.2T of space.  No one would want to do that.  I stand by my point that this controller does not support 3T drives (as 3T drives).  No other unRAID systems share this type of known obsolescence.

 

Agreed.

 

 

[SSD]

Damn bjp999 it looks like you must have peed in someones Cherios.  I have read several threads were people were mad at you. Or at least misunderstood you. I haven't seen it that way & please don't be discourged by these people. You have always been very helpful & I hope you will continue to be into the future.

 

Phil

 

I call 'em as I see 'em.  

 

Thanks for the kind words!

[Superorb]

These cards can be had for $40 shipped on ebay from fresh server pulls, but they do not include the bracket like what is included here. I do not know if the bracket is worth the $10 difference though.

[BRiT]

The bracket was(is?) nearly impossible to find. Some of us lucked out by finding another site that had put together a mass order of 100+ brackets (that's the smallest number they would sell in). Even with that in the end it was nearly $10. It's well worth the cost and savings in your sanity to get it with the bracket already included.

 

These cards work great with 2TB drives and the unRAID 5.0 series.

[madburg]

I don’t want to fill this threat up, so this will be my last post here, we can take it up on another thread if you wish. As this is his sell post.

 

MANY people claimed the BR10i can see the whole 3TB's, MANY people asked if this was true, no one ever replied back and thats fine as those seemed to be occasional people who would post and could easily (which they did) post incorrect facts.

 

I happened to notice via bjp999 other posts he had both the card and the drive, being a moderator comes with responsibilities or at the very least a bit of courtesy, especially when one has SO much to say. I did not say he was a bad guy or does not provide here in the forums. What I questioned his how he works.

 

To shoot down a guy that is selling something by posting a partial fact, and the fact is it will take a 3TB and you will get to use 2.2TB of it, and if one choose to be ok with that, it is their choice, please don’t BS as the wind changes, many people bought 3TB before any support even started for it and were ok with 2.2TB and possible later on being able to extend to the full 3TB with no guarantee. That’s a pattern I am also seeing.

 

The question of this chipset with 3TB drives has been asked time and time again in other POSTs that will be around and peoples reference yesterday, today and in the future. You choose not to only not answer does posts, but also choose NOT to post your finds on any of them. What you did do is post it here for the very first time on a F'in Sell post and that’s a fact. And in my eyes a shity thing to do as a moderator and someone who many look to.

 

So no I don’t feel dissed, I just don’t agree with what you did here. I didn't ask if people like you or not, or agree with you or not (thanks for posting worthly comments guys, in a sellers post).

 

I found the opportunity to take my 3TB drive to a friend’s home to test on a 1068E chipset card and posted my results the day after on a real thread, not on someone’s sell/trade post. I did it not because i have any 1068E cards, I did it for the community. And was a question unanwsered for some time now.

 

Yet how long have you had a 1068E chipset card with a 3TB drive, and never disclosed your finds, but now, here, yes this was the place for it, right? BS.

 

What are you saying to yourself right now, that you did a great deed with you post above, BUYER BEWARE? So you I call 'em as I see 'em. huh? f'in superman.

 

The guy is a fellow unRAID’er, has tested the cards, flashed them, got brackets for them and you know what you’re getting for $50 damn bucks for a great card. That can’t be beat. No one needs to tell anyone here I can find one for $40 on ebay, a buyer can easily do that check and decide for himself what’s worth it, these or the one on ebay.

 

As a moderator here, I try to educate new and existing users about unRAID, including the features to look for in components for arrays.

 

Educate in another post PLEASE, leave this one be, he is not asking for permission, or to justify why he is selling them, or if he will be happier with his newer cards, or if they will be better, or even what what you think.

[savestheday]

These cards can be had for $40 shipped on ebay from fresh server pulls, but they do not include the bracket like what is included here. I do not know if the bracket is worth the $10 difference though.

 

I can guarantee you I didn't pay $40 for this card.  It was more than that (maybe because it came with a bracket) but I am selling these at a small loss (expected).

 

I could care less about the 3tb limit since I don't have and don't plan to have any 3tb drives.  None of my existing drives (28tb array when I'm done) are over 2TB.  I was upgrading for the 6gbps performance because many of the drives that are coming over from my FreeNAS are 6gbps.  After some reading, I thought that 6gbps would help parity, cache and overall writes to the array.

 

I will say it did seem a little unsettling of bjp to ward off potential customers.  Surely anyone looking at the thread would have done their research to read up on the specs of these cards.  BJP's comment seemed unnecessary in a forum full of well read geeks

 

To any potential buyers, I can tell you I've run these cards for a couple weeks and they are without a doubt rock solid.  I'm selling/sold nearly brand new cards with very little use on them for what I think is a fair price. 

 

Any questions, please PM me, thanks!

 

[SSD]

...

 

Responded here:

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=7451.msg134375#msg134375

 

savestheday:

 

As a moderator here, I try to educate new and existing users about unRAID, including the features to look for in components for arrays.

 

And in that spirit, you should realize that no mechanical hard disk can exceed 3 Gb/sec, no matter what the SATA standard it uses, except maybe as it transmits its tiny 64M cache.  Mechanical disks can barely fill 1.5 Gb/sec.  And remember that the network is limited to 1 Gb/sec in theory, and maybe half of that in reality for most users.  Bottom line, if you are replacing a 3 Gb/sec card with a 6 Gb/sec card to get better performance, I fear you are going to be sadly disappointed.  But you are getting controllers that are capable of supporting 3T drives, so hopefully that is part of your justification for paying 5x the price for the new cards, and selling these at a loss.

 

6 Gb/sec is / will be needed for the newest, fastest SSDs, which are not really the best choice (IMO) for unRAID.  But in a workstation, a 6 Gb/sec SSD would be sweet for gaming on other high I/O applications, as it does not need to transmit over the much slower LAN.

[savestheday]

...

 

Responded here:

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=7451.msg134375#msg134375

 

savestheday:

 

As a moderator here, I try to educate new and existing users about unRAID, including the features to look for in components for arrays.

 

And in that spirit, you should realize that no mechanical hard disk can exceed 3 Gb/sec, no matter what the SATA standard it uses, except maybe as it transmits its tiny 64M cache.  Mechanical disks can barely fill 1.5 Gb/sec.  And remember that the network is limited to 1 Gb/sec in theory, and maybe half of that in reality for most users.  Bottom line, if you are replacing a 3 Gb/sec card with a 6 Gb/sec card to get better performance, I fear you are going to be sadly disappointed.  But you are getting controllers that are capable of supporting 3T drives, so hopefully that is part of your justification for paying 5x the price for the new cards, and selling these at a loss.

 

6 Gb/sec is / will be needed for the newest, fastest SSDs, which are not really the best choice (IMO) for unRAID.  But in a workstation, a 6 Gb/sec SSD would be sweet for gaming on other high I/O applications, as it does not need to transmit over the much slower LAN.

 

I didn't get 6gbps cards to improve network performance on a gigabit network   I'm talking about inter drive I/O.  During parity checks and writes back to the array from the cache drive, this won't help? 

 

As I said previously, I have no plans to get 3tb drives.  After I'm done, my array will be 28tb with a mix of 2tb and 1.5 tb drives I already have.  Would it be nice to have 3tb down the line?  Sure.  But that's not why I'm selling these.  I'm selling at a loss because they're technically used.  Luckily I didn't pay 5x the price for my new cards as I got them used for a decent price.

[SSD]

I didn't get 6gbps cards to improve network performance on a gigabit network  I'm talking about inter drive I/O.  During parity checks and writes back to the array from the cache drive, this won't help?  

 

As I said previously, I have no plans to get 3tb drives.  After I'm done, my array will be 28tb with a mix of 2tb and 1.5 tb drives I already have.  Would it be nice to have 3tb down the line?  Sure.  But that's not why I'm selling these.  I'm selling at a loss because they're technically used.  Luckily I didn't pay 5x the price for my new cards as I got them used for a decent price.

 

RAID

 

Let’s say you have a 500G disk capable of reading 1 Gb/sec.  And you install that disk as JBOD on your RAID card.   It will read 1 Gb/sec.  No more, no matter whether the controller and drive both support 6 Gb/sec speeds.  Now let’s say you create a RAID-0 array of two such disks.  Now you have a 1T RAID disk.  And it should be able to read 2 Gb/sec (because in every spin of the 2 disks, it is able to read twice as much information as with a single disk).  A 4 disk array would be 2T, and able to read 4 Gb/sec.  And a 6 disk array would be 3T and able to read 6 Gb/sec.

 

That’s what RAID cards are all about.  Creating arrays that dramatically improve read and write performance.  And with some RAID configurations (e.g., RAID-5), provide redundancy.

 

With one of your RAID cards you could create a fast RAID-5 array and have protection similar to unRAID.  Your performance would be substantially faster locally.  And your write performance over the LAN would be quite a bit better too.  But if you were reading or writing, all of the disks in the RAID array would have to be spinning, so you’d use more electricity.  And if you had 2 drives fail, you’d lose the entire array on that card.  You could set up 3 such arrays with your three cards, each giving up the capacity of one drive for redundancy.

 

unRAID

 

unRAID was not designed to provide RAID-like read and write performance.  It was designed to provide economical redundancy (one parity disk is able to protect a 20 drive array from a single disk failure.)  And it was also designed to only spin up disks that are accessed, and not the whole array.  It sacrifices write performance substantially to achieve these goals, while maintaining non-degraded single drive read performance.  It also has other advantages, like being able to use drives of different sizes, be able to grow incrementally, and not subject to losing all its data if 2 drives fail.  It also does not require expensive RAID cards, just simple JBOD.

 

In order to maintain parity, you might think that unRAID would have to read the corresponding blocks on all disks when a write is performed.  While that would work, it would require spinning every disk in the array for each write.  So unRAID has a shortcut – it can read the block about to be overwritten on the data disk, and read the corresponding block on parity.  With those two pieces of data, and knowledge of what it is about to write to the data disk, it has enough information to compute parity.  So a write to unRAID = read a block from data and read a block from parity (these can happen in parallel), compute parity (very fast using CPU), and then write data block and write parity block (these can also happen in parallel).  Problem is, the writes have to wait for an entire revolutions of the disks - a relative eternity.  This wasted time is what leads to the slow write times to unRAID arrays.

 

Hybrid Options

 

One option you can consider is a hybrid model.  You could take 2 of your 1.5T drives and create a 3T RAID-0 array using your RAID card, and use that RAID disk as parity.  This would give you a nice little performance boost on writes.  (This is what WeeboTech and I do using a 2-port Areca ARC-1200 x1 RAID card).  Spindown can be an issue, so you’d have to see if there are any spindown options with your RAID controller (the Areca has a 1 hour spindown option).  In the same way, you may also be able to define “data disk” RAID-0 arrays on each of your other controllers, and use the rest of the disks as JBOD.  (I don’t have any data disks set up like this but it is possible.)  Using this you might be able to get some value from your RAID cards while still fundamentally using uRAIDs redundancy.  (Consider carefully drive failure scenarios and how you'd recover!)

 

Decision Time

 

RAID, unRAID, hybrid – it's up to you.  Each has advantages and disadvantages.  Let me know if any questions after reading this and I’ll try to answer them.