Gadgetory

this is an unboxing that I've been excited to do for a while this is an LSI mega raid SAS 9268 eye raid controller card so this is exciting because it is a six gigabit per second eight port SAS and SATA raid card so what that means is you've actually got full support for either SAS or SATA drives and either three gigabit per second or six gigabit per second so it's one of the most flexible raid cards out there today now the difference between SAS and SATA I've actually been asked this before SAS are basically enterprise level drives and SATA our consumer level drives you can run a SATA Drive on a SAS interface card but you cannot run a SAS drive on a SATA interface like what you would find built into a motherboard so there that is the difference here we're going to find the product specifications in brief so I'm going to go ahead and scan these for you so you can read them if you really want it supports all the usual raid levels and all the usual monitoring etc things that you might need you've got support for all the latest operating systems and you can always of course haha how often do I say this download the latest drivers from the manufacturer website Thank You LSI for mentioning that you've got theirs calling out that they are the most trusted raid for critical data okay they've also got advanced trade management software and they're just talking a little bit about that on the box but what I am most interested in about this particular product is coming up shortly that was a teaser that's a something that I use from time to time to get people to keep watching the video even when it's a product that probably doesn't have a whole lot of implications for the average consumer maybe you'll learn a little bit of something about raid during this video probably not I do have some more raid themed videos upcoming everyone's been bothering me about that and they are coming trust me it's just been it's been a little bit hectic and there's there's a lot that I want to do with those particular videos so the first thing we find inside is what appears to be a quick installation guide checkout it I'm Pat step one on pack the RAID controller nice okay step two prepare the computer by turning it off unplugging the power step three review the jumpers and connectors and how much further does this go Wow quite a few steps so this is quite detailed it includes some picture diagrams it includes a whole bunch of steps and hey look at that it talks about raid so if you want to know what raid is you could freeze the video right now and read that otherwise you can stay tuned for when I'll be doing a video shortly all right you've got a technical support number on the back and there's some more raid levels in case you were wondering about that there we go okay next we have replacing the full profile bracket with low profile brackets how to do it okay next we have a reduction of hazardous substances report saying that this one is okay so it is RoHS compliant we've got the card itself we'll have a look at that in a moment and then underneath it looks like we have a cable kit so not all raid controllers come with cable kits you got to check the part number to see if it's a bare card or one that comes with cables it doesn't actually matter because you can buy cables usually for about the same price as it would cost to buy a drive with a cable kit so then it's up to you which route you want to go okay so in terms of accessories we have the low profile adapter as you can see it comes with the full height adapter so that's if you're installing it in a 1u chassis or anything else that would require a low-profile adapter we've got a couple of adapters eyeglass SFF 8087 I believe is what this connector is called although feel free to correct me if I'm wrong and then that goes to four discreet SATA / SAS cables on the other side so we have two of those because this is an eight port card next we have a drivers utilities and documentation DVD so you might not want to throw this particular DVD away because it does have some documentation on it probably how to use their software and a bunch of stuff along those lines next we have the card itself here we have it so these interfaces are actually in a rather peculiar place on this card so they plug in right here one two and then out of there you're going to be able to plug into eight drives directly or you can actually use splitters in order to plug this particular card into up to shoot I don't know if it says that on the box but up to 32 SAS or SATA devices there you go so you can split each one so we've got eight lines 32 so you can split each one of these connectors four ways if you're using magnetic drives that probably makes a lot of sense but if you're going to be doing what I'm going to be doing with this card it probably doesn't make much sense because we're going to be trying to find the absolute limit in thorough put for this card with some rule eight SSD drive so the onyx series SSD drive that I unboxed recently I have eight of these and I'm going to be hooking them all up to this particular RAID controller to see what kind of numbers we can pull through it I also have a battery backup unit so battery backups actually here this is going to be a little lesson on rate battery backups are extremely important because the RAID controller actually uses onboard memory in this case 512 Meg's of onboard memory so you can see those modules are here and there are none on the back to to as a cache so with a normal drive cache any data that's being held in the cache if the system is powered off or basically if the system loses power for any reason is potentially lost if it's waiting to be written to the drives and because these dedicated raid controllers have such enormous caches compared to a typical hard drive where you might see a 32 to 64 Meg cache being done pretty much on the high end of what you'd see well it's it's a lot more dangerous to have so much more data just sitting in a cache waiting to be written when the system is powered off so what a battery backup does is it actually provides power to the caches in the event that the system loses power and what that does is it allows the data to stay there until it can be written to the drives when the system is powered back on this is especially in or for anything that is mission-critical which is typically where you'd be looking at using something like a high-end raid card like this well thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the LSI mega raid SAS 9268 I and hopefully I will have some very cool videos for you shortly showing off the SSD capabilities of this particular card