LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-8i

Our friends at LSI were kind enough to provide us with a MegaRAID SAS 9260-8i SAS/SATA RAID Controller Card. This is a great mid-level RAID card that is compliant with PCI Express 2.0 specifications. However, just keep in mind that some motherboards with PCI Express 2.0 will ONLY work with video cards. Consult your user's manual if you have any questions about compatibility.

One very important note, the MegaRAID SAS 9260-8i kit only comes with Mini-SAS to 4x SATA cables. Why? I have no idea... This kit should come with Mini-SAS to 4x SAS cables since it is a "SAS/SATA" kit. At least the SAS cables would work with both SAS and SATA. So just keep in mind that if you order a SAS kit, ensure that your kit includes SAS cables. If not you'll have to order a set. In our case LSI overnighted a pair of  Mini-SAS to 4x SAS cables (shown below).

Some of you old school SCSI users out there may immediately notice just how clean the Mini-SAS cables are. I'm glad to see the huge SCSI ribbon cables go too.

Features

• Eight internal SATA+SAS ports
• Two mini-SAS SFF-8087 x4 connectors
• 6Gb/s throughput per port
• LSISAS2108 RAID-on-Chip (ROC)
  o  800MHz PowerPC®
• Low-profile MD2 form factor (6.6” X 2.536”)
• x8 PCI Express 2.0 host interface
• 512MB DDRII cache (800MHz)
• Optional battery backup unit (direct attach)
• Connect up to 32 SATA and/or SAS devices
• RAID levels 0, 1, 5 and 6
• RAID spans 10, 50 and 60
• Auto-resume on rebuild
• Auto-resume on reconstruction
• Online Capacity Expansion (OCE)
• Online RAID Level Migration (RLM)
• SafeStore™ Encryption Services
  o  Instant secure erase
• SSD support with SSD Guard™
• Global and dedicated hot spare with revertible hot spare support
  o  Automatic rebuild
  o  Enclosure affinity
  o  Emergency SATA hot spare for SAS arrays
• Single controller multipathing (failover)
• I/O load balancing
• Comprehensive RAID management suite

Benefits